xii Preface

It seems that if there were no corpus we would not know where we are
supposed to start reading Plato's oeuvre, for we would not know which dia­
logue provides the gateway into the system. We would not know where to
stop reading; nor how many and which dialogues one needs have studied in
order to lay claim to a full understanding of Plato's philosophy. If there
were no corpus properly speaking, it would be difficult to determine how
much the subtraction or addition of dialogues to the list of Plato's works
would affect our understanding of his philosophy. If possibly inauthentic
dialogues, such as the Hippias Major and Alcibiades I, were incontrovert­
ibly proven to be authentic, or ones taken to be authentic were proven not
to be so, how much would we have lost or gained of "Plato's philosophy"?
Impossible to answer, it seems, if there is no systematic body of thought rel­
ative to which the answer may be formulated.7
Yet if Plato presented a teaching-call it "a philosophy"-in the dia­
logues taken together, it must be admitted that he went to great lengths to
keep it from his readers. For the fact of the matter is that the dialogues give
us very few indications as to how they are to be taken together as a coher­
ent body of thought. Indeed, as Diskin Clay has argued, Plato's texts con­
tain few if any explicit references to one another as written compositions,
and thus fail to build explicitly on one another.8 Perhaps there is some sort
of "system" discoverable through assiduous study of the Platonic dialogues;
but no such system is evident on the surface of three dozen or so dialogues.
If there is a corpus, its degree of unity is certainly looser than that evinced
(sometimes on the surface, sometimes after a bit of digging) by the individ­
ual dialogues. And even at that level, enigmas about the unity of the text
abound, and absolutely crucial matters-such as the nature of the Good or
of Dialectic in and of themselves-are explicitly and notoriously left unex­
plored (Rep. 506d2-e5, 533al-10).9 At both levels-that of the corpus and
that of individual dialogues-Plato clearly means to challenge the reader to
search for completeness.
Consequently, interpreters since antiquity have struggled to answer the
question about the sense in which Plato may be said to have written a "cor­
pus." Diogenes Laertius reports several such attempts, preeminently Thra­
syllus's organization of the dialogues into tetralogies, and into trilogies by
the grammarian Aristophanes.10 The anonymous Alexandrian Prolegomena
to the dialogues also contain extensive discussions of the matter.11 Notably,
these are not efforts to organize the dialogues in order of their chronology
(the dates of their composition). In the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher
rejected all these earlier efforts, claiming to be the first to detect the "natu­
ral order" of Plato's dialogues and so the organic unity of the corpus (an
image Schleiermacher invokes at length).12 In a major paradigm shift, Karl
Friedrich Hermann offered a developmental story (the early chapters of
which consist of tentative formulations of problems and the later chapters