00The argument as a map

Read this once; everything after it is elaboration.

Three axes get confused with one another whenever this debate is conducted under the labels “developmentalist” and “unitarian.” Keeping them apart is most of the work.

Axis	The question	What settles it	State of play
A · ChronologyBrandwood’s gradient	In what order were the dialogues written?	Stylometry; a very little external testimony	Late group secure. Middle soft. Early group unorderable — Brandwood’s own verdict. §05.
A · ChronologyThesleff’s dissent	… and is the gradient itself sound?	The same evidence, plus revision, semi-authenticity and audience	Both consolations go. The late group’s internal order rests on “precarious premises” too, and the coarse bands are “very far from certain.” Thesleff names Brandwood. §10.
B · Socrates	Whose philosophy is in the early dialogues?	Aristotle’s testimony; Xenophon; the Sokratikoi logoi	Contested between heavyweights — Kahn sceptical, Irwin and Smith for independence. And it silently props the order (§16).
C · Doctrine	Did Plato’s views change, or were they withheld?	Presence and absence of doctrine across texts	Genuinely contested. Kahn, Gerson: withheld. This is the classic fight.
D · Equipment	Did Plato’s argumentative resources improve?	Whether arguments fail, and whether later machinery repairs the failure	Not contested. Kahn concedes it in his own words. §25.

01The question: zero the chronology

Suppose we obtained solid proof that Plato wrote the whole corpus inside one year at the end of his life. Which developmental claims could still be derived from textual evidence alone?

None of the seven volumes under review asks this. It is asked here first because it is the question that sorts them. Every position in this literature carries a temporal commitment somewhere, and almost none of them declares it; forcing the chronology to zero makes each one declare. The hypothesis is absurd, and that is what makes it useful. A thought experiment does not have to be possible to be diagnostic — it has to be clean, and this one is. It removes exactly one thing and leaves everything else standing.

The exception — and the second stress test

One class of internal evidence does discriminate, and it is not dependency. It is a method being dropped and then reinstated. The elenchus is used and defended in the Gorgias; it thins out at exactly the point where the defence fails; and it returns in the Meno once recollection has supplied the ground it lacked. Design predicts convergence of style and doctrine — prolepsis predicts that as readily as development does. What design does not predict is a working procedure being abandoned and later restored. That is this review’s one candidate, and it is developed at §§25 and 28.

Honesty requires running the test on the exception as well. It does not pass cleanly either.

02The two readings — and the premise that separates them

The question as posed: are unitarians saying Plato did not change his view in fifty years — which would be absurd — or are they saying the developmentalists’ evidence is insufficient?

The second, with a qualification that matters. Nobody defends the first. What separates the camps is not a claim about Plato’s biography but a premise about what a dialogue is, and therefore about what its silences mean.

a fuller, subtler, and more satisfying account of the differences is available using the resources internal to each dialogue Ebrey & Kraut, Introduction, Cambridge Companion to Plato, 2nd edn (2022) — on the “growing reluctance” to read the dialogues developmentally

Note what that sentence does and does not say. It does not say nothing changed. It says the changes have a better explanation than a changing mind. The target is the inference, not the phenomenon.

03Three claims bundled as “unitarianism”

Ranked from weakest and most widely held to strongest and most exposed.

04What each answer costs

Position	Buys you	Costs you	Vulnerable to
Developmentalism (classic)	A narrative: the philosopher’s growth, with the Meno as hinge	Requires a secure early chronology and a licence to read silence as absence	Brandwood’s own verdict on the early group (§05); the argument from silence
Evidential unitarianism	Immunity — it asserts almost nothing	Explains no positive fact; cannot say what the differences are	Cases where the later machinery is visibly shaped to a specific earlier failure (§25)
Prolepsis (Kahn)	A unified corpus with a designed pedagogy	Posits a decades-long plan plus motives for concealment — an extra entity	Parsimony; and Kahn’s own concessions about the Gorgias arguments
Gerson	Maximum unity	Detaches the thesis from the texts entirely	Nothing — which is the problem

05Brandwood’s gradient

Three groups on a confidence gradient, descending sharply.

the differences that distinguish the final group … those which separate the dialogues of Plato’s middle period from all preceding it are not as sharp Brandwood, CCP² ch. 3 pp. 82–112

On the sequence of dialogues in the early group little can be said. Division into subgroups also seems out of the question. Brandwood — the verdict that matters most for the developmental thesis

The most he will grant is a terminal cluster: Phaedo, Cratylus, Symposium, Republic I, Lysis, Menexenus, Euthydemus, Hippias Major are “among the last of this group” — but “their relative order cannot be determined.”

06The seam — a 1992 chapter inside a 2022 volume

Worth noticing because it shows how the field moved while the chapter stood still.

Brandwood’s chapter opens with a flat developmentalist premise, stated as motivation:

his philosophical activity spanned some fifty years, during which time certain doctrines underwent considerable changes. To trace this development … it is essential to know in what order the dialogues were written. Brandwood, opening of ch. 3

That sits roughly three pages after an Introduction, written thirty years later by Ebrey and Kraut, reporting a “growing reluctance” to read the dialogues that way and recommending resources internal to each dialogue instead. The volume contains both, unreconciled.

07Fine: chronology is neutral

The methodological point that keeps Axis A from settling Axis C.

Fine’s position — stated in the Introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Plato, and present verbatim in the 2008 first edition as well as the 2019 second — is that chronology as such is neutral between developmentalism and unitarianism. Both parties can accept the same order of composition; they disagree about what the order licenses.

This is why the argument has to move somewhere else — and why Part Three goes to a case where the two readings make different predictions.

08The Handbook’s verdict — and the volume that issues it

In 2022 a reference work announced that the developmental consensus was dead. The announcement is worth reading closely, because the same volume disagrees with it twice.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Plato, edited by Gerald A. Press and Mateo Duque, opens with an editorial survey of what has changed in the field. Its first “major development” is the collapse of the three-period division, and the verdict is unambiguous:

In Plato scholarship of the last thirty to thirty-five years, however, four major developments have undermined and resolved these divisions. First, through the work of Holger Thesleff, Debra Nails and others, it has come to be widely recognized that despite the general developmental consensus, there was never, in fact, agreement about exactly which dialogues went into the three groups. More significantly, it was shown that neither thematic nor stylistic evidence unambiguously supports the division of Plato’s dialogues into three groups. Evidence of revision and school accumulation has provided further evidence that assuming the dialogues to have been written in the way modern books are, at one time and by the author alone, is misleading. This has led to the demise of the developmental consensus that existed fifty years ago and a considerable weakening of the developmental-unitarian opposition. They also serve to undermine the project of finding an historically significant Socratic philosophy in Plato’s ‘early’ dialogues, and, in fact, those who pursue ‘Socratic philosophy’ now do so without making historical claims. Press & Duque, Introduction, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Plato (2022) p. 5

That paragraph is doing a great deal of work for this review, and it is the natural terminus of Part One as it stood: §05 showed a gradient rather than three groups, §06 showed a 1992 chapter reprinted unchanged in 2022, §07 showed that chronology is neutral anyway. Here is a reference volume saying the whole apparatus has gone. Three things should be said before that is accepted.

The volume contradicts itself, and not subtly

Seventeen pages of the same book contain William Prior’s entry on developmentalism. It defines the position, traces it to Aristotle, surveys its varieties, and ends with a paragraph that does not report a demise:

Developmentalism has been the dominant interpretive paradigm for Platonic scholarship, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition, in the last century. It has, however, had its critics, beginning with unitarianism. W. J. Prior, ‘Developmentalism’, in Press & Duque (eds.) p. 402

Prior then lists the critics — Kahn, Nails and Thesleff on the stylometric side, Press on the doctrinal side — and stops. More significantly, the body of his entry describes live varieties of the position, and one of them is explicitly built to survive the stylometric collapse:

Penner (1992, 2002) argued that the relevant distinction between Socratic and Platonic dialogues is concerned with the soul: Socrates views the soul as simple, whereas Plato has a tripartite conception of the soul… This version of developmentalism has the advantage that it does not require modification of the stylometric distinction between the early and middle dialogues. Differing conceptions of dialectic provide the basis for yet another version of developmentalism, the Socratic method of elenchus being succeeded by the Platonic method of hypothesis and finally by the method of collection and division (Robinson 1953). Prior, same entry p. 402

That second variety — elenchus, then hypothesis, then division — is precisely the thesis Part Four of this review will find Kahn himself asserting about the Gorgias and the Meno. It is not a fossil. It is the live centre of the dispute.

And the volume’s own technical entry is more careful than its introduction

Debra Nails writes the Handbook’s entry on compositional chronology — the place where the claim would have to be substantiated. Her opening sentence is measured, and the scope of its verb matters:

It was once hoped that determining the order in which Plato composed his dialogues would permit the mapping of his philosophical development, but that approach, dominant for some hundred and fifty years, now creaks unreliably. D. Nails, ‘Compositional Chronology’, in Press & Duque (eds.) p. 402

What creaks is the inference from composition order to philosophical development. Not “has collapsed”; and the entry closes by sending the reader to Ryle’s “comprehensive, common-sense discussion” of composition order and to Irwin’s “case for the Anglo-American ‘standard view’ of the order of composition, distinguishing it from simple developmentalism” p. 406. An entry that ends by naming a defence is not an obituary.

Ausland on where the three periods came from

The Handbook also supplies the historical diagnosis, in Hayden Ausland’s account of the reception. Schleiermacher (1804) held that the dialogues form a series deliberately designed as such by Plato; K. F. Hermann converted that into an unfolding over which Plato had no authorial control; and the three periods we use are neither of those but a nineteenth-century British modification:

…in his 1867 edition of the Sophist and Politicus, Lewis Campbell found affinities in the diction of the presumably late Laws with that found in five other dialogues (Sph., Plt., Philebus, Timaeus, Critias). With this observation he paired a surmise that Plato had later in life re-considered both the political and the metaphysical idealism of the R. in favour of a compromise with the real world in both regards… But the conjectural three-period ordering and explanation proposed by Campbell in 1867 still remain those habitually assumed by Platonic scholars today, if usually without a sufficiently critical appreciation of their historical genesis or scientific fragility. H. W. Ausland, in Press & Duque (eds.) pp. 399–400

Two things in that are worth separating. The observation was linguistic and it has held: there is a late group. The surmise paired with it was doctrinal — that Plato softened in old age — and it was a conjecture about content dressed in the authority of a finding about diction. What the twentieth century inherited was the pair, and it has been using the second on the credit of the first ever since.

09Nails: six criteria, and a circularity

The entry is a demolition conducted criterion by criterion. The cumulative shape is the argument.

What the ancient evidence actually gives

Two data bear directly on order. Aristotle at Politics 1264b26 says the Republic antedates the Laws. Diogenes Laertius (3.37) says the Laws were “in the wax” at Plato’s death and were transcribed by Philip of Opus. To that Nails adds the linguistic evidence catalogued by Thesleff — “notable synchysis, plummeting rate of hiatus, absence of certain clausulae” — which marks out a group: Timaeus, Critias, Politicus, Sophist, Philebus and Epistles 7 and 8, “all as late and edited with the same stylistic principles in view, perhaps those of Philip.”

And then the sentence that is the entry’s central negative finding — which should be read for exactly what it says and no more:

Not unreasonably, scholars sought definitive style-markers of R. that would permit the identification of a set of R.-like dialogues, leaving a third and earlier set, yet more remote from Lg. Although that effort has failed to distinguish the ‘early’ and ‘middle’ groups reliably, the bulk of modern scholarship has nevertheless followed Campbell’s nineteenth-century identification of three periods of productivity. Nails pp. 402–3

The late group stands. The early/middle boundary does not. That is the same result §05 reached from Brandwood’s numbers, arrived at independently.

The four criteria

The circularity result

Then the paragraph that turns the four criteria against each other, and which is the strongest thing in the entry:

Consensus about the order of composition has stayed firmly out of reach for several reasons. Despite the wondrously exact results achieved by many of these scholars, their results contradict one another within and across the methods used. Moreover, a circularity problem confounds (1)-(4): each suggested order depends on first positing a pre-R. exemplar for which no independent confirmation has ever been credible, though the Apology has been an unfortunate favourite — unfortunate because court speeches are not reliably compared to dialogues. Nails p. 404, citing Nails 1995: 53–63

Stated generally: every method of ordering needs a fixed point at the early end to measure distance from. The late end has one, supplied by Aristotle and Diogenes. The early end has none. So an exemplar must be posited; the ordering is generated relative to it; and the ordering cannot then confirm the exemplar without circularity. The Apology is the usual choice and it is a bad one, because it is not a dialogue.

The two structural findings

Criteria (5) and (6) are different in kind. They do not compete with the first four — they undermine the question the first four were trying to answer.

What Nails does not claim

She does not say Plato’s thought failed to develop. She does not say the three periods are false. She says the project of recovering development from composition order creaks — and ends by naming two treatments the reader should consult, one of them a defence of the standard view. The distance between that and “the demise of the developmental consensus” is the distance between a method in serious trouble and a thesis refuted.

10Thesleff: dispersion, function, revision, audience

Four planks across three books. Three are negative; the fourth is positive, and it is what makes the other three bite.

Thesleff’s case runs across Studies in the Styles of Plato (1967), Studies in Platonic Chronology (1982) and Studies in Plato’s Two-Level Model (1999), collected in 2009 as Platonic Patterns. It is the source Nails cites for the Laws mannerisms, for the summary of stylometry, and for the proto-Republic; and it is the deeper half of the demolition, because it supplies a rival explanation rather than only a set of objections.

Plank one · the conspectus

Pages 153–65 of the Chronology print every proposed ordering from Tennemann (1792) onward, each with the criteria its author used. Read consecutively it is a remarkable document, and Thesleff’s note on why he prints it is characteristically dry:

…in general the lack of cumulative linearity in the progress of research of this kind, perhaps will also justify the printing of the list here: a later study is not necessarily closer to the truth than an earlier one. Thesleff, Platonic Patterns p. 153

A reviewer counts one hundred and thirty-two distinct chronologies in it. The inference Thesleff intends is the one Nails reaches by another route at Agora, Academy 53–63, and the two are best read as a single finding:

Plank two · style tracks function, not date

This is the plank the Handbook’s introduction does not mention, and it does the most work. Studies in the Styles of Plato is not primarily a book about chronology. It is an attempt to describe what Plato’s styles do. Thesleff distinguishes ten classes — colloquial, semi-literary conversational, rhetorical, pathetic, intellectual, mythic narrative, historical, ceremonious, legal, and the onkos style — and then asks what governs their distribution. The answer is dramatic and rhetorical function:

3. Rhetorical style. … It is commonly employed for play and parody in the early and middle works… But commonly also, and indeed more often, it serves Platonic persuasion above the mimetic level. Then it naturally occurs mainly in monologues or speeches…

4. Pathetic style. … Its primary function is to add to the liveliness of the style, and hence it is particularly common in interludes. It is largely mimetic…

5. Intellectual style. … on the whole, it seems that it serves a serious purpose in Platonic argument, and also in visions… It is significant that the intellectual style is particularly manifest in those works which develop the methods of Platonic philosophy, Men., Phd., Prm., Tht., R. VII–IX…

8. Ceremonious style. A solemn style, mostly used … to add loftiness to myths and visions and (in the late works) speeches. Thesleff, Studies in the Styles of Plato pp. 136–8

Consider what that does to stylometry. If the incidence of a stylistic feature is set by whether a passage is a myth, an interlude, a parody, a stretch of formal rhetoric or a stretch of dialectic, then measuring its frequency across a whole dialogue measures the mix of passage types in that dialogue. Two works will resemble each other stylometrically when they contain similar proportions of similar kinds of writing. That is a fact about their contents and their form, and there is no reason it should be a fact about their dates.

His verdict is blunt:

Traditional chronological stylometry cannot be expected to yield useful results. Thesleff p. 227

And he is careful to distinguish that from a rejection of statistical method. Three pages later he recommends “a very broad ‘cluster stylometry’” on large bodies of material by computer, and a 1981 postscript reports his own tests, run with K. Loimaranta on Thesaurus Linguae Graecae tapes of the Burnet text, with Xenophon as a control. The results are a stylometrist’s refutation of stylometry, conducted with the tools:

(d) The differences in the use of particles are on the whole greater between the three types of exposition studied … than between the various works in the Corpus.
(e) The differences … are greater between ‘obviously’ authentic works such as Chrm., Grg., Phd. and Smp., than between the authentic works en bloc and various dubia or spuria.
(f) No statistically reliable dialogue clusters were found apart from [the Xenophon control, the late group, and a group around Phdr., Prm. I, R. II–X and Tht.]… Thesleff p. 230 n. 202

Result (d) is the empirical form of the functional thesis: passage type is a larger source of variance than date of composition. Result (e) is a warning that the technique cannot separate the certainly genuine from the doubtful, which is a low bar it does not clear.

Plank three · revision and semi-authenticity

Nails’s criterion (5) is Thesleff’s, and he states its target precisely — not a claim about the texts, but about an unexamined assumption concerning publication:

The modern view of Platonic chronology rests to some extent upon premises concerning methods of publication which are probably anachronistic. It is taken for granted or implied that the finishing of a manuscript for a dialogue was in most cases the result of a single effort within a relatively short space of time. Thesleff p. 230

To that he adds “semi-authenticity”: composition in cooperation with younger members of the Academy, with the institution functioning in a role “analogous to that of a modern copyright-supervising body of publishers” p. 231. The consequence is that “Platonic dialogue” may name a text with a compositional history rather than a date — and on his account a great deal of the corpus does.

Plank four · different audiences

The fourth plank is the positive one, and it is the alternative explanation of everything developmentalism explains by date. Thesleff sets it out in the 2009 Introduction, as a list of complications which “taken together, exclude the possibility that the dialogues reflect a steady line of linguistic change”:

In spite of considerable opposition by some authorities, it seemed in the 1980s that the stylometrists had won the game. I tried to show that they had not. … I point out the numerous complications that, taken together, exclude the possibility that the dialogues reflect a steady line of linguistic change. Such complications include the revision of the texts; Plato’s cooperation with younger friends (‘semiauthenticity’); the oral discussion behind the texts, which may have affected even the choice of style; and, above all, the different audiences to whom the written dialogues were originally addressed. Thesleff, Introduction to Platonic Patterns pp. xiv–xv

Applied to the group that matters most for this review:

It seems to me easier to argue (as I did) that most of the so-called ‘early’ dialogues were written for different audiences and different purposes after the Academy had been ‘founded.’ Thesleff p. 390 n.

Plank five · the confrontation with Brandwood

The four planks above are Thesleff’s general case. There is also a specific one, and it is aimed at the source §05 relies on. Thesleff reviewed Brandwood’s 1958 dissertation closely — he calls it, in the same breath, “well-informed and prudent” and “in most respects of great value” — and then says it does not go nearly far enough:

Consequently, any attempt to determine stylometrically the internal chronological order of the dialogues in the ‘late group,’ not to mention the ‘middle’ and ‘early’ groups, rests methodologically upon precarious premises. It is regrettable that this fact was not clearly envisaged by Brandwood (1958) … Brandwood rejected all attempts so far to establish the internal chronology of the ‘early’ and ‘middle’ groups on linguistic grounds; but he did not find the method inapplicable in principle. And for the ‘late group,’ certain apparent linguistic trends, notably in the use of clausulae and the avoidance of hiatus, led him to accept the order Timaeus—Critias—Sophist—Politicus—Philebus—Laws… Whatever one thinks of the reliability of clausulae and hiatus as Platonic style markers, the method is not basically sound. Thesleff, Platonic Patterns p. 218

Two distinct disagreements are packed into that paragraph, and they matter differently.

The ground of (ii) is stated a page earlier, and it is a claim about authorship in general, not about Plato:

It does not seem to me likely, even in theory, that the direction of the change in individual style normally follows a distinct trend which could be characterized quantitatively as a steady increase in certain features … and a steady decrease in others. And it is even less probable that the characteristics of such a trend, if it does exist, could be somehow derived by interpolation or extrapolation from two separate works of an author for which the chronological order is known — say, the Republic and the Laws … Do such consistent and manifestly traceable trends ever occur in literature? The burden of proof rests with those who assert this. Thesleff pp. 217–18

Where Thesleff is harder on the early group than Brandwood

Brandwood’s verdict is that the early group cannot be ordered. That presupposes there is a determinate order which the instrument fails to recover. Thesleff denies the presupposition — and then, having denied it, produces an ordering anyway, on entirely non-stylometric grounds. His Concluding Chronological Sketch pp. 381–2 lays the corpus out in three columns which are not dates at all:

His own verdict — and his own caution

Part II of the Chronology opens with the summary of where the negative case leaves things:

The results arrived at so far in the present study are for the most part negative. The sad and perhaps irritating truth is that the strict, reliable and elegantly linear Platonic chronology dreamed of by earlier generations of scholars, seems to be today even more remote than ever.

Should we give up? Thesleff p. 245

He does not give up. Part II builds a new model and ends with “a tentative sketch of a new chronology, open to further debate.” Thesleff is not an anti-chronologist; he is a chronologist who thinks the existing methods worthless and proposes better ones, and his own reconstruction is itself a developmental story of a kind — a proto-Republic preceding the text we have, the dramatic dialogue form arising in the Academy.

And on the question this review is asking, he is explicit that it remains open:

Much more careful study and pondering is needed to make sure what in the dialogues reflects a real development in thought (and style), and what are suggestions and experiments for different readers. Thesleff p. 390 n.

Set that beside the Handbook’s “demise.” Thesleff’s position is that we cannot presently tell development from audience-variation — not that there was no development.

11What the demolition establishes — and the three developmentalisms

Two lists, kept apart. Most of the confusion in this area comes from running them together.

Three claims travel under one name

The question “is developmentalism over?” cannot be answered until they are separated. It is the same discipline §03 applied to unitarianism, applied now to the other side.

D1 is in serious trouble at the early/middle boundary and secure at the late one. That is not a nuance; it is the actual state of the evidence, and both Nails and Thesleff say so. A scholar who writes “the late dialogues” stands on firm ground. A scholar who writes “the early dialogues” is using a category whose boundary has never been fixed by a method that does not assume it.

D2 has lost its instrument but not its subject. Everything in §§09–10 attacks the inference from composition order to development; none of it touches the antecedent likelihood that a man writing for fifty years changed his mind. What has gone is the claim to trace the change by ordering the texts. This is why the Stanford Encyclopedia can still record the question as open rather than closed — noting that “it remains a matter of dispute whether the division of Plato’s works into three periods … does correctly indicate the order of composition, and whether it is a useful tool,” and that even for the secure late six “there is, as yet, no agreement among students of Plato that these six form a distinctive stage in his philosophical development.” The same finding at both ends: the compositional group is secure, the philosophical stage is not.

D3 is the casualty — and it is the one the Handbook’s introduction is right about. It has been abandoned, and those who now pursue “Socratic philosophy” do so, as the editors say, “without making historical claims.” The reason is structural. D3 requires D1 at exactly the boundary where D1 fails, and requires it to carry a further weight besides: that the works on one side of the line report someone else’s views. With the line unsecured, the historical thesis has nothing to stand on. This is the same conclusion Part Two reaches by an entirely different route — through Aristotle, Irwin and the four gates — and the convergence of a stylometric argument and a source-critical one on the same casualty is the strongest single result in this review.

One observation about the sociology, because it explains why the answer feels less clear-cut than it is. The three-period division is enormously convenient: it supplies a way of citing, a way of building a syllabus, and a way of quarantining inconvenient passages. Ausland’s phrase at §08 is the exact description — “habitually assumed… without a sufficiently critical appreciation of their historical genesis or scientific fragility.” A framework can be simultaneously without evidential support and in universal use, and that is the actual condition of Platonic chronology. Announcing its demise is premature; relying on it without argument is no longer respectable.

12Kahn’s creativity objection — target and backfire

The most quoted sentence in the anti-developmental case, and the least load-bearing.

it is highly implausible to assume that a philosopher as creative as Plato should remain fixed in the position of his master for a dozen years or more Kahn, first objection to Vlastos

13What Aristotle actually says

Before asking how much weight the testimony bears, it is worth being exact about what it consists of. It is not what the developmental tradition’s shorthand suggests.

(a) His default is that the dialogues are evidence for Plato — Socrates included

He mentions the Phaedo (Met. 991b3–4) and “Socrates in the Phaedo” (GC 335b9–17); alludes under Plato’s name to the Phaedrus, Theaetetus, Sophist and Philebus; and contrasts the Timaeus with the unwritten doctrines (Phys. 209b11–16).

(b) Separately, he ascribes specific doctrines to a Socrates who is not Plato

Never dialogue-by-dialogue. Always doctrine-by-doctrine:

Topic	What he says	Where
Method	“Socrates asked questions but did not answer them; for he confessed that he did not know” — never said of Plato	Top. 183b7–8
Scope	concerned with ethics, “not at all with the whole of nature”	Met. 987b1–2; PA 642a28–31
Definition	“he was seeking the universal (katholou) in moral things and was the first to turn his thought to definitions”	Met. A.6 987a29–b8
Attribution	“there are just two things one might fairly ascribe to Socrates — inductive arguments and universal definitions”	Met. M.4 1078b27–30
Separation	“Socrates did not make universals or definitions separate; they [the Platonists] separated them”	M.4 1078b30–32
Verdict	“he did not separate them from particulars. And he was right not to separate them… separating is the cause of the difficulties arising about the ideas”	M.9 1086b3–7
Ethics	denied akrasia; identified courage with knowledge; made all virtues knowledge; did away with the non-rational soul	EN 1145b22–31, 1116b3–5, 1144b17–30; MM 1182a15–30

That Met. M.4 line — “one might fairly ascribe to Socrates” — is the closest thing to a methodological statement anywhere in the corpus. Note what it is: a list of two doctrines, not a list of texts.

(c) There is a grammatical marker, but it is a rule of thumb

14Aristotle as the external prop

How much weight the testimony can carry — and why the recent literature says: less than the developmental tradition assumed.

Instrument	What it claims	Status
Fitzgerald’s canon	The definite article distinguishes references to the historical man from references to Plato’s character	A blunt instrument; contested in application
Stenzel’s tense criterion	Present tense = dialogue character; past/imperfect = the historical man	Suggestive, not decisive
Kahn’s “dazzling screen”	Aristotle read the dialogues; his Socrates is largely Plato’s Socrates read back	Widely influential; the sceptical position
Smith’s tally	Only 7 of 26 relevant Aristotelian passages plausibly derive from the dialogues, so independence survives	Minority — Wolfsdorf labels it the “charitable” reading

Irwin’s argument — stronger than a tally, and the reason he needs it

T. H. Irwin, “The Platonic Corpus,” ch. 3 of the Oxford Handbook of Plato (2019), pp. 76–77, answers Kahn by name (n. 24 cites Kahn 1996: 79–87, which “discounts Aristotle’s [testimony]”). His argument is not a tally. It is an argument from selectivity.

15Irwin’s three options — and what Aristotle cannot decide

The most useful thing in Irwin’s treatment is his own concession about how little the testimony is needed, and how little it settles.

study of the dialogues reveals the sorts of differences that Aristotle describes; and even without his help we ought to be able to see the differences for ourselves. Without his evidence we would not know that the differences have anything to do with the historical Socrates, but we would have to take account of them somehow in our account of Plato’s development. Irwin, Plato’s Ethics p. 10

Strip Aristotle out entirely and the doctrinal differences remain and still demand explanation. What the testimony contributes is one thing only: the claim that the difference is a difference between two men rather than between two stages or two authorial purposes. Irwin then sets out the three surviving options.

The choice between the first and the second explanation depends on our estimate of Aristotle’s credibility. Irwin, Plato’s Ethics p. 10

16The decoupling move: developmentalism without Socrates

This is the section the rest of the review leans on. It is written to be self-sufficient: the source-critical case is set out here in full, with the authors quoted at length, so that the conclusion — that the historicity of Socrates is idle for the philosophy in Plato’s dialogues — can be checked against the evidence without going back to the individual volumes.

The argument runs as four gates. Each asks whether the historical Socrates can do a job the developmental reading has traditionally asked of him. All four fail, and the fourth fails decisively.

The witnesses, and what each is worth

The standing inventory rests on a criterion Waterfield states plainly: “if we are going to search for the historical Socrates in the literary remains, we need to rely on authors with privileged access to authentic Socratic material. Since Socrates himself wrote nothing, the only relevant privilege is that the authors should have been contemporaries or close contemporaries” Bloomsbury p. 2. That yields five candidates — and, on the source-critical literature, five problems.

Witness	The finding	Who
Aristophanes & Old Comedy	“Enough Old Comedy survives for us to be certain of the rules of the game, and they did not include historical truth.” Dorion adds that the Clouds Socrates is “really a composite figure whose traits were gathered not only from Socrates himself but also from the physiologoi and the sophists.”	Waterfield p. 7 (with Dover); Dorion p. 6
Xenophon	Downgrading him is question-begging: “Xenophon is said not to understand Socrates because what he says about Socrates differs from what Plato says, when the very issue we are trying to resolve in the first place is which of them, if either, is to be trusted.”	Waterfield p. 6
The other Socratics	Same genre, same disability. “There was no Socratic school: every follower was free to develop his own ideas and to use ‘Socrates’ to express those ideas.”	Waterfield p. 10
Plato	“Plato made up the story, then, as a way of introducing his own mission, the mission he would assign to the character Socrates who was to appear in his works.” The Apology is not exempted.	Waterfield pp. 12–13
Aristotle	“In short, there is no way to treat Aristotle as either a reliable or an independent witness.” Contested — see §14 and §15.	Waterfield p. 6; contra Irwin

The ground has been cleared. There is no way we can trust any of our witnesses to Socrates’ life and work, either singly or in conjunction. Waterfield, “The Quest for the Historical Socrates,” Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates pp. 13–14

Gate 1 · The sources are the wrong kind of text

This is the strongest finding in the literature, and it is not a modern imposition: the classification is Aristotle’s own.

Dorion draws the methodological consequence, and it is the sharpest formulation of the whole problem — that the question has been mis-posed from the start:

The Socratic problem has all the makings of a false problem because it rests on a misunderstanding… For the Socratic problem as it had been debated since the start of the nineteenth century to have meaning, the principal direct witnesses (Xenophon and Plato) must have intended to faithfully reconstruct Socrates’ ideas… Yet everything seems to indicate that neither Xenophon nor Plato set out with the intention of faithfully reporting Socrates’ ideas. Dorion, “The Rise and Fall of the Socratic Problem,” Cambridge Companion to Socrates pp. 7–8

Xenophon’s and Plato’s Socratic writings belong to a literary genre — that of the logos sokratikos, which Aristotle explicitly recognized and which authorizes by its very nature a certain degree of fiction and a great freedom of invention as far as the setting and content are concerned, most notably with the ideas expressed by the different characters. Dorion p. 8

And Waterfield reports the consensus rather than claiming novelty:

It is in fact generally acknowledged that the Sōkratikoi logoi are a species of fiction, and that the differences between the views of Socrates we find in the Socratics tell us more about the authors than they do about the historical Socrates… each of them used Socrates as an ideal and a cipher, for his own purposes. Waterfield pp. 9–10

Gate 2 · The figure was already circulating before the prose tradition

If the Sōkratikoi logoi were the first literary use of Socrates, the fiction finding would still leave open that each author invented from life. Bromberg’s two chapters close that door: a public “Socrates” existed on the Athenian stage before the prose tradition, and it shaped what followed.

What matters is not the count but what the count shows: the comic “Socrates” is assembled from a transferable repertoire applied indifferently to Hippon, Protagoras, Damon and Prodicus:

intellectuals and their students in Old Comedy are neither all-seeing nor provident: they are, on the contrary, ‘forgetful’… and ‘gullible’… ‘pretentious’… ‘beggars’… ‘braggarts’… ‘supple, dissembling, slippery, pretentious’… ‘thieves’… and sloppy dancers. Bromberg pp. 46–47 — each predicate attested across several poets and several targets

The comic tradition then fed the prose one, in both directions of the corpus:

just as Kolakes has provided material and inspiration for Plato’s Protagoras, Autolykos will have given Xenophon material for his symposium, including the presence of Socrates. Storey 2003: 324, quoted approvingly by Bromberg p. 44; cf. p. 45 on “the monopoly of influence that Clouds has held over the Socratic tradition since antiquity”

And his companion chapter states the chronological result that matters most here — a literary Socrates was taking shape before Plato chose to write one:

Documenting engagements with Socrates and Socratic ideas in pre-Platonic texts allows us to understand what some of the earliest Socratic receptions might have looked like, and how a literary tradition about Socrates began to take shape in the final decades of his life — and, importantly, in the years leading to Plato’s decision to represent him in literary (dramatic) form. Bromberg, “Greek Tragedy and the Socratic Tradition,” Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Socrates p. 42

He also states the problem of identification at the outset, which is worth keeping because it names the difficulty precisely: “there is the question of establishing what we mean by ‘Socrates’. The earliest mentions of his name are in Athenian Old Comedy, where he is identified as an unwashed, chattering charlatan… But this is not the Socrates familiar to readers of Plato and Xenophon” p. 41. And: “some of our earliest descriptions of the man (i.e., in Aristophanes’ Clouds and Plato’s Apology) not only disagree, but in several places explicitly contradict one another” p. 42.

Gate 3 · Convergence between sources is intertextuality, not corroboration

This is the gate that kills the eclectic method — the practice, running from Schleiermacher through Vlastos, of triangulating the historical Socrates from points where the sources agree. Waterfield gives three reasons it fails; the third is the decisive one:

since the Socratics were writing fiction, when one of them echoes the other (and, as far as we can tell, Plato’s texts were generally primary), it is more appropriate to talk of intertextuality than of historical veracity. Waterfield p. 11

His test case is the Delphic oracle: he argues Plato invented the Chaerephon story and Xenophon knowingly reworked it, substituting “free, upright, and prudent” for “wise.” “This is a good demonstration of how intertextuality rather than biographical veracity was the name of the game for the writers of Sōkratikoi logoi” p. 13. And the aggregate:

there is no conclusive reason why we should privilege one of our authors over another, and there is no conclusive reason why we should think that any of them was writing anything close to what we understand as history or biography. Waterfield p. 11

Dorion reaches the same place from the other side — the sources do not converge in the first place. “It is quite surprising that there is no consensus regarding the number and identity of Plato’s dialogues that would allow for the reconstruction of the historical Socrates’ ideas, but, in another way, this disagreement among interpreters is inevitable because of the doctrinal heterogeneity of Socrates’ character in the corpus platonicum” pp. 6–7.

Gate 4 · And it would not change the philosophy anyway

The three gates above are about whether historicity is recoverable. This one is about whether it would matter — and it is the gate that settles the question for this review.

Read that against what this review actually argues. The claim in §25 is that the Gorgias’s arguments fail and the Meno’s machinery repairs the failure. Grant Waterfield’s point in full and nothing in that claim moves. The defect is in the argument; the repair is in the later text; the relation between them is a relation between two pieces of writing. Whether the earlier position was ever held by a man in the Agora is a further question, and answering it in either direction leaves the relation exactly where it was.

Waterfield’s note on Fitzgerald’s canon makes the same point about the strongest philological instrument available: even where the grammatical criterion holds, “all this proves is that Aristotle thought he was referring to the historical Socrates, not that he actually was, as a result of access to privileged information” n. 23, p. 330.

The standoff over Aristotle, in one place

Aristotle is the one witness where the literature genuinely divides, so it is worth having both sides here rather than only in §§14–15.

Position	Argument	Source
Against Waterfield	The regress: “if we suppose that Aristotle did have access to sources… independent of Plato’s and Xenophon’s writings, who or what were these sources? They must have been other Socratics, but then this begs the whole question, since the problem in the first place is that the Socratics’ depictions of Socrates are not consistent with one another.” Plus: “He never met Socrates, who died 15 years before he was born… Almost all his references to Socrates can be traced to passages in Plato.”	Bloomsbury pp. 6, 8
For Irwin	The selectivity argument: Aristotle discriminates among dialogues, so he needs a criterion; no internal criterion supplies one (the Phaedo counterexample); therefore external evidence. See §14.	Oxford Handbook pp. 76–77
Limit Irwin again	Whichever way that goes, Aristotle adjudicates only between Socrates’ own views and Plato’s own earlier views — both developmental. He says nothing about compositional intent. See §15.	Plato’s Ethics p. 10

What the field does instead — two live programmes

Both major responses abandon the classical quest. They differ about what replaces it, and for our purposes they land in the same place.

Dorion quotes two summaries that state the shared result better than either programme does. Kahn: “The historical Socrates certainly existed, but to a very large extent the fifth-century figure escapes our grasp. What we have instead is the literary Socrates of the fourth century, in a diversity of portraits” (Kahn 1990: 287, at Dorion p. 20). And Morrison: “the cautious and reasonable view is that certainty about the historical Socrates is lost to us — and, in a way, not very important. The most important fact about Socrates was his influence” (Morrison 2000a: 780, at Dorion p. 20).

The reformulation

17The gap: Style A machinery, Style B talk

Stated without any theory about what Socrates privately believed.

The elenchus is a procedure. You assert p. Socrates obtains your assent to q and r. He shows that q and r entail not-p. You retract.

What that establishes, in point of logic, is that {p, q, r} cannot all be true — an inconsistent set. It does not identify the false member. Perhaps p. Perhaps q.

how is it that Socrates claims to have proved a thesis false when, in point of logic, all he has proved is that the thesis is inconsistent with the conjunction of agreed-upon premises for which no reason has been given in that argument? Vlastos, Socratic Studies p. 25 — his own statement of the problem

18The Gorgias proof-language

Vlastos’s texts T19–T24, Socratic Studies ch. 1. This is the evidential base — assembled, and certified as localised, by the very scholar whose reconstruction is under suspicion.

19Vlastos’s bridge — (A) — and the chain it generates

The hypothesis that closes the gap, and the developmental story that follows from it.

So [A] is Plato’s present to his teacher, bestowed on him in the Gorgias, where he is made to say those very strong things … of which there is no sign earlier on. Vlastos, Socratic Studies p. 36

Note what that sentence concedes: (A) is not the historical Socrates’ premise, and not the early dialogues’ premise. It is an intrusion, at one point, by Plato — because Plato, not Socrates, is the one who feels the epistemological worry. Vlastos p. 36: “It must be Plato, then, who comes to feel the force of that question when he writes the Gorgias.”

The 1983b concession, and the chain it produces

Replying to Kraut in the same volume of Oxford Studies, Vlastos conceded that outside the Gorgias there is no evidence for (A) at all — that in the pre-Gorgias dialogues Socrates argues as any philosopher does:

he picks premises which he considers so eminently reasonable in themselves and so well-entrenched in his interlocutors’s system of belief, that when he faces them with the fact that these premises entail the negation of their thesis he feels no serious risk that they will renege on the premises to save their thesis — as in fact, they never do. Vlastos 1983b: 73, quoted at Wolfsdorf pp. 39–40

20The four responses, and the survey verdict

The reception. Source: David Wolfsdorf, “Socratic Philosophizing,” in Bussanich & Smith (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates (2012), pp. 34–67 — a survey, not an advocacy piece, which is why it is the right place to check.

Most scholarship of the last quarter century has been devoted to solving, dissolving or criticizing attempts to solve or dissolve the problem of the elenchus. This is true for Vlastos (1983a), Kraut (1983), Brickhouse and Smith (1984a), Polansky (1985), Benson (1987, 1990b, 1995), Adams (1998) and Santana (2007, 2009) … In short, the bulk of the discussion of Socrates’ method in the last quarter century has been devoted to the elenchus and to the problem of the elenchus. Wolfsdorf p. 35

Respondent	Move	Status
Kraut 1983	Socrates has no special method; he picks premises he considers eminently reasonable	The first reply, and the one Brickhouse & Smith later endorse
Brickhouse & Smith 1984a	Attack (A) directly: Socrates has no means of assuring, and no reason to believe, that his moral belief-set is wholly true — a fortiori not his moral and non-moral beliefs	The standing objection to (A)
Benson 1987, 1990b, 1995	Accepts that the elenchus “actually cannot refute a given ethical thesis, but only expose inconsistency among a set of beliefs”; redescribes the aim as refuting the interlocutor’s knowledge-claim	“has not won much support”
Brickhouse & Smith 2002b	Heterogeneity: there is no single thing to have a problem	The live objection — see below
Santana 2007, 2009	Reaffirms that there is a problem; corroborative agreement carries greater evidential weight	Most recent contribution

As far as the elenchus is concerned, Benson’s dissolution has not won much support. Indeed, the most recent contributions to the debate, Santana’s, reaffirm that there is a problem of the elenchus … In short, Vlastos’s problem remains alive and invites further reflection. Wolfsdorf p. 66

21Is the problem a reconstruction? Three layers

The distinction that dissolves the “it’s just Vlastos” objection. People collapse these three and then attack the wrong one.

22Corrections

Three attributions in the first pass of this analysis were wrong. They are recorded because the corrected versions are load-bearing.

23Kahn poses the problem himself

Not dissolves. Poses.

§4 opens by conceding the negative result: “The results of all three refutations are essentially negative: to reveal the incoherence between the life and the doctrine of the interlocutor, an incoherence reflected in the inconsistency between different views held by the same man” p. 137. He then sets the strong claims beside it — Grg. 508e–509a, where the conclusions are “bound and fastened with iron and adamantine arguments” — and asks:

But how can such highly personalized refutations and, in the central case against Polus, such a complex and dubious argument, justify such strong and universal claims? Kahn p. 138

That is the problem of the elenchus in Kahn’s own words. And §5 goes further, conceding both halves of §21 and the fourth step:

We know that the argument against Polus is not strong enough to establish Socrates’ conclusion; and it is hard to believe that Plato was entirely unaware of this fact. Kahn p. 143

24Kahn rejects (A) — and fills the same slot

His answer is not Vlastos’s. But it occupies the identical logical position, which is itself informative.

It is not that these claims follow from premises that are actually believed by his interlocutors (as Vlastos once suggested). It is rather that these claims are protreptic: this is what everyone will believe and prefer if they understand what is at stake. So at 495e 1 Callicles will change his mind “when he has come to see himself correctly.” Kahn p. 140 n. 15

Kahn’s own filler: shame, and the unconscious desire for the good

25“The limits of the Gorgias” — a developmental argument

Kahn §5, pp. 142–147. The structural-fit argument, run by the arch-unitarian, in the exact place it is needed.

He first shows what the positive arguments actually rest on. The conclusion at Grg. 505b is reached “by an argument that relies essentially on the notion of the virtues as the order and harmony of the soul (taxis, kosmos) … introduced here by a systematic induction or epagōgē from the arts.” And then:

The necessity that binds Callicles here is strictly one of analogy. And the same is true for the next step … Thus it is entirely on the basis of this analogy from the arts that Socrates establishes the superiority of moral discipline over unrestrained gratification in the final refutation of Callicles at 505b. Kahn pp. 142–143

He then catalogues the reasoning of the whole section: “Aside from the wordplay, which expresses a conviction rather than an argument, all the reasoning in this section takes the form of analogy or comparison” — virtue and the products of art, virtue and nature, politics and the building trade (514aff.), politics and medicine (514d, 517eff.), the politician and the keeper of animals (516a), the politician and the charioteer (516e). p. 144

The footnotes reinforce it. n. 22 gives the internal corroboration: Charmides 165e, 166b 7–c 3 — Plato himself has Socrates criticise reasoning by epagōgē. n. 23 gives the external: Bernard Williams (1985: 22), Socrates’ argument against Callicles is “so unconvincing, in fact, that Plato later had to write the Republic to improve on it.”

And then the repair, named item by item

What is lacking here is, first of all, a moral psychology of the kind to be developed in Books IV and VIII–IX of the Republic, a psychological theory that can give rational support to the intuitive conviction that justice is the health of the soul … What is lacking also is a theory of knowledge that can provide more content for the notion of technē, more substance to the notion of moral knowledge as a decisive component of the life in philosophy. And for Plato, a theory of knowledge will also require a theory of the object of knowledge, in other words a metaphysics. Kahn pp. 144–145

To get from the technikos of the Gorgias to the philosopher-king we will need the doctrine of the Forms. And to explain how the Forms can guide and motivate a life of virtue, we will need the theory of philosophical erōs. Finally, in order to expound and defend such theories Plato will need a mode of argument that goes beyond the techniques of elenchus and epagōgē employed in the Gorgias. More specifically, he will need the more powerful notion of dialectic introduced in the Meno with the method of hypothesis. Kahn p. 145

26But prolepsis survives — chapter 6

Kahn has not changed sides. He holds both things, and the next chapter shows how.

On basic issues of moral philosophy Plato remains faithful to the position presented in the Gorgias … But the technikos of the Gorgias is not yet the philosopher-king. For that we will need the psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics of the Republic. So there is room for a large development of Plato’s thought between the Gorgias and the middle dialogues: Symposium, Phaedo, and Republic. Kahn p. 148

Into that space he places the seven threshold dialogues — Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Meno, Lysis, Euthydemus — and describes them in unmistakably proleptic terms:

I suggest that the search for essence in the Laches, Euthyphro, and Meno is from the start future-oriented, that is to say, designed to prepare the way for the doctrine of Forms. But Plato’s mode of exposition is so subtly ingressive that this design can only be perceived retrospectively, from the vantage point of the middle dialogues. Kahn p. 148

27Two axes, not one

The same corpus, two independent questions, two different answers — and the confusion of them is what has kept the debate running.

28The corrected reconstruction, in four steps

The natural way to state the whole argument is in three steps. The shape is right; two of the three steps are wrong in instructive ways, and fixing them produces a fourth step that is the only one doing real work.

Step 1 — correct, with three caveats worth keeping visible

Step 2 — “predominantly” is carrying too much

The exceptions are load-bearing rather than marginal:

Case	Why it breaks the clean grouping
Republic I	Elenctic throughout — and it is Book I of the paradigm middle dialogue.
Meno	Its first third is elenctic. Vlastos says so himself (Vlastos 1988: 144, at Prior p. 82).
Theaetetus	Stylometrically late, thoroughly elenctic, and it ends in aporia.

And the sharper problem: the strong form of the difficulty is concentrated in one dialogue, not a group. Vlastos conceded in 1983b that outside the Gorgias there is no evidence for (A) at all (§19).

Step 3 — the Forms are the wrong machinery

Forms say nothing about the problem. The problem is: why drop p rather than q? Three pieces of middle-period apparatus bear on that, and Forms are the last of the three, not the first.

Step 3(ii) — the elenchus does not stop where the Forms start; it comes back

On Vlastos’s own account (§19), Plato “loses faith in the elenchus and proceeds to extricate Socrates from it” in the Euthydemus, Lysis and Hippias Major — dialogues containing no theory of Forms. Then recollection arrives and “in Meno… the elenchus returns.”

What the argument actually is — and where it stops working

The corrected version, in four steps

29The decoupled thesis

Why the argument has to be stated without (A) — and why that is the contribution rather than a concession.

Objection	Against Vlastos’s version	Against the decoupled version
Kraut 1983	Bites — denies Socrates needs a special premise	Survives — no special premise claimed
Benson	Bites — redescribes the aim so the gap stops mattering	Survives — Benson concedes the logical fact, and the Gorgias proof-language is not in dispute
Brickhouse & Smith 1984a	Bites hard — (A) is unassurable	Survives — (A) is not used
Brickhouse & Smith 2002b	Bites	Still bites — heterogeneity attacks the explanandum. See §31.
Kahn	Rejects (A) at n. 15	Concedes it — §§23–25

30The position adopted here — and the scholars who already hold it

Marked as mine, not a reviewed author’s. Everything before this section reports; this section commits.

A review that only reports leaves its reader without the one thing the reporting was for. So: the seven volumes have been described; here is the position I hold, stated so that it can be attacked separately from the reporting, and so that a reader who rejects it can still use the rest.

Why this is not a compromise between the two camps

It looks like a hedge and is not one. It concedes more to the unitarians than developmentalists usually do, keeps less than developmentalists usually want, and refuses something both sides have taken for granted.

Dancy holds this already, and has since 2004

This is the part I did not expect to find. R. M. Dancy’s Plato’s Introduction of Forms is a three-hundred-page developmental argument — the Theory of Forms grown out of the Socratic demand for definitions — and it opens by declining the chronology outright:

This book is concerned with a development in Plato’s thought. But it does not depend on a particular chronological scheme. The development in question is in the first instance a logical one. The most natural way of thinking of this development is as a chronological one as well, and I know of nothing against this, but if Plato’s biography turns out to be more complex, so be it. R. M. Dancy, Plato’s Introduction of Forms (Cambridge, 2004) p. 4

A page later he throws out the chronological labels along with the scheme, and replaces them with argumentative ones:

The dialogues I am going to consider fall into two groups: they are those frequently taken to be the “early” and “middle” dialogues, but, since I am emphasizing argument rather than date, I have preferred the labels “Socratic” and “doctrinal.” Dancy p. 5

The substitution is not cosmetic. His “Socratic” group is defined by four features — Socrates is the main speaker; the task is defining something for a practical purpose; the task fails; and Socrates professes no doctrine beyond the Socratic paradoxes pp. 5–6. Membership is decided by reading the dialogue, not by dating it. And he adds, closing the door on the very move Part One shows cannot be made: “I am not going to be trying to discern development, whether logical or chronological, within the group of Socratic dialogues” p. 5.

So the position is not new, and it should not be advertised as new. What is new is generalising it. Dancy ran it once, on one axis, for reasons of his own; Brickhouse and Smith ran it on another; Kahn conceded it about his own thesis. Nobody drew the conclusion that this is how the whole dispute has to be conducted.

Where I depart from him — two points, and the first is the useful one

And Brickhouse & Smith arrive at the same place from the other side

Dancy is not alone, and the second precedent is more useful than the first, because it comes from scholars this review otherwise treats as opponents. Thomas Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith are the source of the heterogeneity objection at §20 and the standing threat at §32.2 — the claim that there is no such thing as the Socratic elenchus. On the substance they are adversaries. On the method they are allies, and they say so at length.

Their developmentalism is deflated to almost exactly the size proposed here:

This book provides further evidence for developmentalism — which, for the sake of convenience, we have characterized as making a distinction between Socrates and Plato, although, as we said earlier, we are not actually committed to the view that the ‘Socrates’ of whom we speak is the historical philosopher by that name. T. Brickhouse and N. D. Smith, Socratic Moral Psychology (Cambridge, 2010) p. 193

No biography, no dates — a distinction between two bodies of argument. And their §1.3.1, titled flatly “contra chronology,” argues that content analysis alone does the work. Their demonstration is the interesting part: they take the three loudest opponents of chronological ordering and show that each of them, having demolished the dating, quietly rebuilds the same grouping on other grounds.

For these reasons, I urge readers not to undertake the study of Plato’s works holding in mind the customary chronological groupings of ‘early’, ‘middle’, and ‘late’ dialogues. It is safe to recognize only the group of six late dialogues. Even for these, it is better to relegate thoughts about chronology to the secondary position they deserve and to concentrate on the literary and philosophical content of the works … John M. Cooper, Introduction to Plato: Complete Works (Hackett, 1997) p. xiv

One very large group of dialogues can usefully be identified here. These are what we may call the Socratic dialogues — provided that the term is understood to make no chronological claims, but rather simply to indicate certain broad thematic affinities. In these works, not only is Socrates the principal speaker, but also the topics and manner of the conversation conform to what we have reason to think … was characteristic of the historical Socrates’ own philosophical conversations. Cooper p. xv

I once believed that my arrangement of the dialogues in Group I was a chronological sequence, but I now think it is a mistake to make any claims about a matter on which we have so little evidence. Even if they are taken as chronological, however, my six stages do not pretend to represent the development of Plato’s thought. They represent different moments in his literary presentation of Socrates and different approaches to the philosophical position of the Republic. Kahn p. 48

Since the dialogues of Group I are earlier, I have described their relation to the Republic as proleptic. But this term “proleptic” may seem too chronological. It does not greatly matter in what order these dialogues were actually composed or in what sequence they are in fact read. My six stages may be thought of as the proposal for an ideal reading order. Perhaps the better metaphor will be spatial rather than temporal: instead of before and after we can speak of exoteric and esoteric, of relative distance from the center as defined by the Republic. As a variant on the notion of prolepsis, this mode of interpretation might equally well be called ingressive. Kahn p. 48

And he keeps the grouping while dropping the dating, in as many words: the division into three groups is “the kind of solid philological result, intersubjectively confirmable” p. 47, whereas “the order of dialogues within each group is a matter of personal conjecture” p. 47.

Brickhouse and Smith draw the general conclusion twice, and it is the conclusion adopted here:

If Cooper’s position is consistent — and we think it is — then it follows that one can jettison the entire apparatus and the methodologies of chronological ordering and nonetheless advocate some version of both the first and the second foundational principles of Socratic studies. Brickhouse and Smith p. 21

Kahn’s project shows that content analysis — even if it has been extolled as an instrument of chronology — requires no commitment to chronology in order to sustain the field of Socratic studies. Brickhouse and Smith p. 22

Where this sits among the five positions

Position	On the order of composition	On doctrinal change	On argumentative equipment
Developmentalism (classic)	Needs it, and needs it secure at the early end	Reads it off the order	Reads it off the order
Evidential unitarianism	Accepts it; denies it licenses anything	Undetermined by the evidence	Silent
Prolepsis (Kahn)	Accepts a narrow one p. 59	No fundamental change across the project	Concedes change p. 148
Gerson	Irrelevant	The position preceded the writing	Silent
Logical-first (adopted here; Dancy 2004 on the doctrinal axis; Brickhouse & Smith 2010 on moral psychology)	Does not use it. Where an order is needed, the arguments fix it, one pair at a time	Open — not decided here (§32.1)	Change, and the direction is recoverable from the defect–repair fit (§§25, 29)

The programme — the position I intend to work from next

§30 has already used Dancy as a precedent: he is the proof that a full-length developmental argument can be run without a chronology. What follows says what I want to take from him beyond that, and why.

Four sentences that constitute the charter

One — the order is logical before it is temporal. This is the sentence the whole programme turns on, and it is the first thing he says about method:

This book is concerned with a development in Plato’s thought. But it does not depend on a particular chronological scheme. The development in question is in the first instance a logical one. The most natural way of thinking of this development is as a chronological one as well, and I know of nothing against this, but if Plato’s biography turns out to be more complex, so be it. R. M. Dancy, Plato’s Introduction of Forms (Cambridge, 2004) p. 4

Two — the groupings are argumentative, so they are readable off the texts. Where the field names its groups by date, he names them by what Socrates is doing in them:

… since I am emphasizing argument rather than date, I have preferred the labels “Socratic” and “doctrinal.” Both labels could be misleading: the first because it suggests that the historical Socrates is in view and the second because it suggests that things are written in stone. Neither implication is intended here. Dancy p. 5

Three — the substantive thesis, in his own compressed form. This is what the programme is about, and it is a claim about two states of one philosophical practice, not about two decades:

Socrates in certain dialogues produces arguments to defeat proposed definitions without committing himself to the idea that the things being defined are to be found in an eternal, unchanging, and ontologically pure realm. In other dialogues definition takes more of a back seat, and Socrates does commit himself to that metaphysical view. The metaphysical view is the Theory of Forms. Dancy p. 4

Four — the discipline about what one may not order. He refuses, in advance, exactly the ordering Part One shows cannot be had — and he loses nothing by refusing it:

I am not going to be trying to discern development, whether logical or chronological, within the group of Socratic dialogues. Dancy p. 5

He also says, plainly, the thing the unitarians treat as a scandal

Sometimes it is made to sound as if Plato would be inferior as a philosopher if he ever altered his views about anything. I think, on the contrary, that changing one’s mind often is something any self- and other-respecting philosopher can be expected to do: the questions are far too difficult. Dancy p. 4

Set beside §03: no unitarian actually denies this, and Dancy is not attacking a position anyone holds. But it states the working attitude the programme adopts — that development is the normal condition of a philosopher, and that the burden falls on whoever claims a fifty-year fixed point, not on whoever claims a change.

What I mean to add to it

31The census — decisive either way

One outstanding objection, one piece of work that answers it, and a second job the same work does.

32What is not settled

Recorded so the review does not overclaim.

33The whole thing as a map

Click a node to collapse or expand its branch. Drag to pan; hold Ctrl or ⌘ and scroll to zoom, or open it full screen.

The interactive argument map is available only in the web version of this review; it reproduces, as a collapsible tree, the structure set out in §§00 and 27–31.