Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues

by Catherine H. Zuckert

Faced with the difficult task of discerning Plato’s true ideas from the contradictory voices he used to express them, scholars have never fully made sense of the many incompatibilities within and between the dialogues. In the magisterial Plato’s Philosophers, Catherine Zuckert explains for the first time how these prose dramas cohere to reveal a comprehensive Platonic understanding of philosophy.

To expose this coherence, Zuckert examines the dialogues not in their supposed order of composition but according to the dramatic order in which Plato indicates they took place. This unconventional arrangement lays bare a narrative of the rise, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy. In the drama’s earliest dialogues, for example, non-Socratic philosophers introduce the political and philosophical problems to which Socrates tries to respond. A second dramatic group shows how Socrates develops his distinctive philosophical style. And, finally, the later dialogues feature interlocutors who reveal his philosophy’s limitations. Despite these limitations, Zuckert concludes, Plato made Socrates the dialogues’ central figure because Socrates raises the fundamental human question: what is the best way to live?

Plato’s dramatization of Socratic imperfections suggests, moreover, that he recognized the apparently unbridgeable gap between our understandings of human life and the nonhuman world. At a time when this gap continues to raise questions—about the division between sciences and the humanities and the potentially dehumanizing effects of scientific progress—Zuckert’s brilliant interpretation of the entire Platonic corpus offers genuinely new insights into worlds past and present.

 

Genres: Philosophy

896 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2009

About the author

Catherine H. Zuckert is the Nancy R. Dreux Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. She was Editor-in-Chief of The Review of Politics from 2004-2018, and Visiting Professor, ASU’s School of Civic & Economic Thought and Leadership in 2019.

Zuckert’s book, Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form, won the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Award for the best book written in philosophy and religion by the American Association of Publishers in 1990. Understanding the Political Spirit: From Socrates to Nietzsche, edited by Zuckert, received a Choice award as one of the best books published in political theory in 1989. Her book on Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (University of Chicago Press, 2009) won the R.R. Hawkins award from the Association of American Publishers for the best scholarly book published that year. She co-authored The Truth about Leo Strauss (2006) and Leo Strauss and the Problem of Political Philosophy (2014) with Michael P. Zuckert (both published by the University of Chicago Press), and edited Political Philosophy in the 20th Century: Authors and Arguments (Cambridge University Press, 2011) as well as Leo Strauss on Political Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2018). Her most recent monograph, Machiavelli’s Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2017), was selected by the Washington Examiner as a book of the decade.

Zuckert has received several grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as the Bradley and Earhart Foundations.

She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, has been listed in several editions of Who’s Who in America, and was selected as a member of the Templeton Honor Role in 1998.

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

At times a very tough book to get through. It’s one of those books as you’re getting completely confused about one thing, the author then will start to confuse you about something else then repeat the first confusion but by the next point you start to realize the meaning of the original confusion and so on till things start to seem to make sense, then the author moves onto something else entirely.

Zuckert (the author) provides something that a casual reader of Plato can’t get on their own. The connection between each dialogue and the significance of the characters between different dialogues. This book took 17 years to write and the reader gets to profit from the author’s scholarship and the special knowledge that is inherent within the characters who speak. I think the author said Plato probably did write Alcibiades I and II, that surprises me because I would have said he did not because they were the dialogues that made sense to me and had conclusions, a very un-Plato thing to do. I yield to the author’s authority.

Plato (through his Socrates character) warns against the ‘ego’ being determinative for our self and that the most dangerous person is one who thinks they know but do not. All of Plato has that warning and not only can’t sophist not teach virtue since they fail to understand what it is, politicians can’t rule justly since they lack the meaning of justice. Sometime read Livy and you’ll understand the difference between Greek thought and Roman: Greek lens is through justice; Roman lens is through liberty.

The author would relate Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, and Hannah Arendt often to the discussions within the dialogues. Plato like Kant has the ‘thing-in-itself’ the unknowable real thing. Plato gives truth as out there, Kant redefines the nexus of truth through his Copernican revolution for the mind, and puts truth within us and confounds it with intuition, space, and time while Plato puts truth, the Good, the Just and Virtue ultimately outside of us and potentially reachable. For a Platonic realist Goodness is real, for a nominalist it is not. For Plato there is a horse, and there are horses and moreover there is ‘horseness’. For a nominalist there is no such thing as ‘horseness’.

Within Plato as shown in this book all the classical Christian arguments for the existence of the Christian God are within this book. The author doesn’t say this but I will briefly note that Augustine takes Paul, Cicero and Plotinus and creates his version of Christianity. I don’t think this author mentioned Plotinus but she did dissect the Timaeus, and it’s clear that Plotinus’ Enneads are greatly influenced by that dialogue, and Plotinus is fundamental for Western mythical beliefs.

Plato’s classical Christian arguments include that without a God watching over us there can be no ‘objective morality,’ though in the Euthyphro dialogue Plato shows how piety originating divinely can be problematic. Also, Plato would indicate that since we have the moral law within us that means there must be a God. That’s exactly the argument that Kant ultimately used to save a place for his God.

The one and the many within the universe of the One (Parmenides) and the rearranging of the parts within the universe through Plato’s crossing the Heraclitus River had the Kamal Cosmological argument popping out within the dialogues: everything that began to exist had a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe had a cause. Plato is wiser than modern Christians because he never attaches an imaginary creator to the argument.

With Plato it’s always more complicated because the ultimate truth Plato strives for is that our ego can not be determinative for our truths. Another classical Christian argument that could be borrowed from Plato is that of the nature of Being as absolute. Heidegger rejects ‘cogito ergo sum’ since Descartes assumes the world away and Heidegger writes Being and Time using the special status of Being as formulated by Plato.

Plato gets that the dichotomies of logic break-apart at being and not-being (non-existence). I’ll even note from the Meyer book Reading Nietzsche through the Ancients: An Analysis of Becoming, Perspectivism, and the Principle of Non-Contradiction, the PNC (principle of non-contradiction) assumes an existence of the non-existence. I know neither Heidegger or Nietzsche are Christians but their arguments can be employed by Christians who have read Plato and understand Aquinas’ God such that His essence is his existence.

Thomas Aquinas (and Maimonides) use Aristotle as their basis for Reason rather than Plato. That’s a mistake for religion but a boon for science. At the end of the age of the Scholastics (1350 CE), Platonic realism gets replaced by nominalism (i.e. things are just labels that we use, and absolutes exist only as ideals). As I was reading this book, it’s clear that Platonic thought could more align with Christian dogma especially after being massaged by Plotinus, while the nominalism of William of Ockham replaces justice, truth, love and Good to mere labels. Plato consistently advocates for his Platonic realism and the Christians would have been better to never have integrated Aristotle into their myths.

The depth in this book was so deep and complex I would be able to say that someone could read this book and claim with little exaggeration that they’ve read the complete works of Plato. The author is that good at explaining the dialogues.

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amazon Review

This is basically an expression by Ms. Zuckert of previous scholar's translation and comments on Plato's philosophy, where she picks and choses from these other scholars what she feels makes more sense to her, and she makes a tapestry of all them.

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Essential Keys to Plato

You'd think that after 24 centuries there might not be a whole lot of new things to say about Plato, but Zuckert makes startling discoveries about the Platonic corpus that everyone else seems to have overlooked. The first bombshell is that chronologically (in terms of when it was supposed to take place) Laws is the very first dialogue, not the last as many scholars have assumed. Since there's no mention of the Peloponnesian War, it must take place before 431, and in fact a close look shows that the Athenian Stranger's views are all rooted in pre-Socratic philosophy. Zuckert's clear, detailed, well substantiated argument about Laws got me hooked, and I ended up reading the entire 862 pages with interest and enjoyment, at the same time going over many of Plato's dialogues again.

Having read several essays on Plato by Leo Strauss, Zuckert's teacher, and his other followers, I was familiar with the idea that the argument of each dialogue emerges in tandem with the unfolding of the action, as well as the idea that the narrative structure (narrated by Socrates, told by a third person, not narrated, etc.) is related to the theme. Zuckert's approach, encompassing as it does the entire corpus, also makes clear the significance of the dramatic dates. For example, when we see that Lysis takes place years after Symposium and Phaedrus, we find that it "contains a critique of both the definitions of love presented in the two earlier dialogues" (p. 511). So what has sometimes been pigeonholed as a "minor" dialogue comes alive in the discussion of an important topic.

By looking at the dialogues in sequence we get a better sense of who Socrates is and how his thought developed (according to Plato, of course): the stripling struggling with Parmenides; the brash young man taking Protagoras down a couple notches with his hard questions; the confident thinker expounding a positive teaching in Symposium and Republic; the father figure seeking to benefit Theages and Meno; and finally the wise man facing his biological and intellectual limits in the dialogues around the time of the trial. The dialogues featuring Timaeus and the Eleatic philosopher offer contrasts that help us understand more deeply what Socrates is all about.

Although Zuckert follows in the footsteps of Strauss, who wrote that each of Plato's dialogues had to be understood in the context of the whole, she has a good grasp of the full gamut of research literature on Plato, not just Straussian, and a fine bibliography.

Also unlike Strauss, she states what she thinks very clearly, and, moreover, in prose generally free of technical and academic terms. She is the worthy student of a great teacher, and this work marks an important new beginning in Platonic studies.

Asia Khuf


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Embracing the challenge of the Platonic corpus as a whole, Catherine Zuckert uncovers its overarching narrative: by tracing a path through the dialogues in a sequence of dramatic dating, while contrasting Socrates with Plato’s other philosophical spokesmen, Zuckert’s comprehensive and thought-provoking study brings to light the Platonic understanding of the problems bequeathed to Socrates by his predecessors, the development of his response and its limits, and finally the superiority of Socratic philosophy to its alternatives.

Ronna Burger, Tulane


In Platonic studies there is little agreement on how the dialogues are to be read as a whole. Dislocating our sense of the chronology of the dialogues, Catherine Zuckert’s Plato’s Philosophers presents both a dramatic challenge to the reader of Plato’s dialogues as a whole and a clear and penetrating analysis of the dialogues and their interconnections.

Diskin Clay, Duke

Very few scholars have attempted to discuss all thirty-five dialogues, and no one before Catherine Zuckert had to my knowledge followed their dramatic order in doing so. This order informs her reading, but does not govern it; she considers each dialogue individually, allowing the thought of each character to stand out on its own. Her approach unquestionably brings out features of the dialogues that would otherwise remain unnoticed. The exercise of trying to get a handle on Plato as a whole is one that anyone who is serious about understanding the dialogues should undertake, and Zuckert’s labors have made it easier for us to do so.

Jacob Howland, University of Tulsa


No serious student of Plato could fail to benefit from [Zuckert's] careful, intelligent, probing, and illuminating discussions... An important, impressive, and, one hopes, lasting book.

Mark Blitz . Claremont Review of Books