Why did Plato put his philosophical arguments into dialogues, rather than presenting them in a plain and readily understandable fashion? A group of distinguished scholars here offer answers to this question by studying the relation between form and argument in his late dialogues. These penetrating studies show that the literary structure of the dialogues is of vital importance in the ongoing interpretation of Plato.

Plato and his Predecessors considers how Plato represents his philosophical predecessors in a late quartet of dialogues: the Theaetetus, the Sophist, the Politicus and the Philebus. These predecessors appear in imaginary conversations; and they are refuted when they fail to defend their philosophical positions in debate. Professor McCabe argues that Plato's reflections on these conversations allow him to develop a new account of the principles of reason, and forge a fresh view of the best life--the life of the philosopher.

Plato and his Predecessors considers how Plato represents his philosophical predecessors in a late quartet of dialogues: the Theaetetus, the Sophist, the Politicus and the Philebus. These predecessors appear in imaginary conversations; and they are refuted when they fail to defend their philosophical positions in debate. Professor McCabe argues that Plato's reflections on these conversations allow him to develop a new account of the principles of reason, and forge a fresh view of the best life--the life of the philosopher.

Contradicting the long-held belief that Aristotle was the first to discuss individuation systematically, Mary Margaret McCabe argues that Plato was concerned with what makes something a something and that he solved the problem in a radically different way than did Aristotle. McCabe explores the centrality of individuation to Plato's thinking, from the Parmenides to the Politicus, illuminating Plato's later metaphysics in an exciting new way.

Tradition associates Plato with the contrast between the particulars of the sensible world and transcendent forms, and...

Given its brevity, Plato's Meno covers an astonishingly wide array of topics: politics, education, virtue, definition, philosophical method, mathematics, the nature and acquisition of knowledge and immortality. Its treatment of these, though profound, is tantalisingly short, leaving the reader with many unresolved questions. This book confronts the dialogue's many enigmas and attempts to solve them in a way that is both lucid and sympathetic to Plato's philosophy. Reading the dialogue as a whole, it explains how different arguments are related to one another and how the interplay between...

M. M. McCabe presents a selection of her essays which explore the ways in which the Platonic method of conversation may inform how we understand both the Platonic dialogues and the work of his predecessors and his successors. The centrality of conversation to philosophical method is taken here to account both for how we should read the ancients and for the connections between argument, knowledge, and virtue in the texts in question. The book argues that we should attend, consequently, to the reflective dimension of reading and thought; and that this reflection explains both how we should...