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Reviewed by:
  • Plato’s Philebus: A Philosophical Discussion ed. by Panos Dimas, Russell E. Jones and Gabriel R. Lear
  • Colin C. Smith
Panos Dimas, Russell E. Jones, and Gabriel R. Lear, editors. Plato’s Philebus: A Philosophical Discussion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 304. Cloth, $70.00.

Plato’s Philebus is motivated by a question concerning the relationships among pleasure, wisdom (phronēsis), knowledge, and the good human life. Something of a philosophical tour de force, it also contains discussions of numerous important Platonic subjects like cosmic intelligence (nous), distinctions among intellectual capacities, and the method of dialectical inquiry through division and collection. But the riches of the dialogue are obscured by its exceptional difficulty, a frequent grievance from commentators beginning at least with Galen. Plato’s Philebus: A Philosophical Discussion is an indispensable new contribution to our understanding of this important and challenging dialogue, containing a wealth of new work by an international group of eminent scholars who unpack the text’s many dense passages and explain their fit together as parts of a labyrinthine whole.

In addition to offering new work on the Philebus, the book is noteworthy as the first installment in the Plato Dialogue Project (PDP). Modeled on the Symposium Aristotelicum, the PDP involves inviting scholars to analyze specific passages of a text and meet collectively to discuss and revise each analysis for publication as a chapter in a single volume. The resulting book is a collaborative effort in which authors frequently compare and develop their own views with respect to those of the other contributors, yielding a dialectical discussion instead of a collection of disparate papers. (Compare John Dillon and Luc Brisson, editors, Plato’s Philebus: Selected Papers from the Eighth Symposium Platonicum [Sankt Augustin: Academia Verlag, 2010], and the other recent Symposium Platonicum volumes that gather many dozens of papers written by authors from various interpretive traditions that are not directly in dialogue with one another.)

Supplemented by a short index, the book contains fifteen chapters, all but the first of which are focused on a particular passage of the Philebus and arranged in an order reflecting that of the dialogue. The essays are also divided thematically across subjects. Following Sean Kelsey and Gabriel Richardson Lear’s introduction to the dialogue’s difficult argumentation and novel account of the dialectical function of the text in response to this problem, chapters by Katja Maria Vogt, Susan Sauvé Meyer, Russell E. Jones, and Verity Harte cover the ethical inquiry into the appropriate mixture for a good human life that motivates the dialogue. Chapters by Satoshi Ogihara, Panos Dimas, Giles Pearson, Pierre Destrée, James Warren, and Spyridon Rangos concern the account of the nature of pleasure itself. Finally, chapters by Paolo Crivelli, Mary Louise Gill, Hendrik Lorenz, and Jessica Moss address a cluster of metaphysical concepts, including dialectic, ontology, cosmic intelligence, and cosmology. The spread of the treatment of themes is admirable if not entirely even, as I address below.

Since I cannot discuss all the book’s contributions to the literature in such a short review, I focus on a few that I found to be of particular value. Crivelli offers an especially insightful account of the fit between the three articulations of the problem of the “one and many” (14c8–15b8) and Socrates’s description of dialectical methodology (16b5–18d2). Crivelli situates the latter passage both with respect to other descriptions of division and collection in Plato like those of the Phaedrus and Sophist (as is typically done), but also suggests novel ways in which this account of dialectic responds specifically to local problems in the Philebus that appear early in the dialogue and factor into its conclusion regarding the mixture in a good [End Page 155] life. Crivelli understands his account to address the ways in which the argument concerning unity and multiplicity “goes astray” (34), but I wonder whether further development of the role of the intermediates (which Crivelli admittedly glosses [52–53]) might help us to see how Socrates’s account here is not astray but instead right on track.

Gill tackles the difficult subject of the fourfold ontology dividing the unlimited, limit, their mixture, and their cause (23b–27c...

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