This outstanding work provides the most penetrating analysis I have yet encountered of the precise goals and methods of that educational activity in which Socrates so fully and fruitfully engaged for the benefit of himself and others. The author proceeds through an interpretation, tightly and economically focused on this theme, of the shorter Platonic dialogues—many of which have never before received so serious and so illuminating an exegesis. . . . The scholarship is meticulous, the contribution—to the fields of Plato studies, educational theory, classical philosophy, and political philosophy—truly major.