Abstract

Professor Kahn says that Plato and the Socratic Dialogue “presents a new paradigm for the interpretation of Plato’s early and middle dialogues as a unified literary project, displaying an artistic plan for the expression of a unified world view”. To this end, Kahn argues that “[w]hat we can trace in these dialogues is not the development of Plato’s thought,” as Aristotle and others seem to have thought, “but the gradual unfolding of a literary plan for presenting his philosophical views to the general public”. This “unfolding” begins shortly after the Gorgias. Kahn argues that Plato then “created an essentially new form, the aporetic dialogue with a pseudo-historical setting” in order to bridge the psychological distance between the ordinary conception of the world and the radically new world view he would present in the middle dialogues. Kahn calls his interpretation “the hypothesis of ingressive exposition” and says that this hypothesis is “the claim that the seven threshold dialogues [Laches, Charmides, Euthyphro, Protagoras, Meno, Lysis, and Euthydemus] are designed to prepare the reader for the views expounded in the Symposium, Phaedo, and Republic, and that they can be adequately understood only from the perspective of these middle dialogues”.