Preface xiii

of solutions) tied to notions about Plato's mental progress and the "spirit of
the times." This influential view provides one way of seeing how the corpus
is unified. In conjunction with the idea, encouraged by Hegel, that any
philosopher worth his or her salt simply must have a system-one that
evolves over time and reflects basic structures of the given historical
epoch-the "developmentalist" story became attractive. That story allows
us to say that Plato's works possess "unity" in the sense that a philosopher's
evolving and historically contextualized search for a system possesses unity.
These nineteenth-century assumptions founded a now familiar picture.
The early dialogues are taken to be heavily influenced by the historical
Socrates-if not reasonably faithful reproductions of Socrates' views-with
later dialogues representing Plato's gradual emancipation from Socrates
and the development of Plato's own system. It is hard to resist some version
or other of a developmentalist account that is parasitic upon a chronologi­
cal account, since some of those dialogues appear to shed the literary fea­
tures of the dialogue form, including their explicitly aporetic character, and
to present us with something closer to the now more familiar treatise style
of exposition; since in four later d ialogues Socrates has been replaced as the
leading interlocutor; since in these dialogues the topics strike us as "doing
philosophy" in a sophisticated and technical sense; and since we assume
that a first-rate philosopher changes and develops his views over time (the
likes of Kant, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger come to mind) such that the
ideal result would be a comprehensive and systematic teaching.13 If nothing
else, a developmentalist account would provide us with an alternative to the
disturbing possibility that there is no Platonic corpus properly speaking.
However, developmentalism rests on a series of assumptions that are cer­
tainly questionable, and indeed that are increasingly questioned.14
The question of the unity of Plato's oeuvre is not, of course, the sole
remaining question facing readers of Plato. I would add the following to the
list of questions worthy of continued investigation:

• What other forms of intertextuality are there within Platonic texts (for
example, the recurrence of certain characters in various dialogues
invites us to compare and contrast)? And what forms of intertextuality
are there between Plato's texts and those by other authors (for example,
Plato frequently incorporates other sorts of works and discourses into
his dialogues, such as poetic, tragic, and comic texts) ?1' How do we unify
these different kinds of intertextuality? With respect to this second kind
of intertextuality, we might ask why Plato chooses to incorporate these
literary and rhetorical texts and genres into his dialogues, and how their
presence affects our reading of the dialogues. Still further, to what
extent is Plato's use of poetic and rhetorical subtexts reconcilable with
his explicit denunciations of poetry and rhetoric?