In this penetrating and graceful analysis, Monique Dixsaut reveals that the project of Plato's dialogues is to "invent the philosopher" in a sense the term never again had. The dialogues show, by dramatic and dialectical instantiation, that a person seeking truth engenders a coherent system intended to determine what is. Since one cannot judge a path until he has taken it to the end, this "science of free men" comes upon truth and acquires intelligence; the ideas develop from a thinking that desires to think in a different way, without asking whether this is possible. One who thinks in this...