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The Pseudo-Platonic Seventh Letter By Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede (ed. Dominic Scott ) Oxford University Press , 2015, pp. xv + 224, £30 ISBN 978-0-19-873365-2
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It is a familiar paradox that philosophy typically aims to reveal the perennial nature of objective reality, and yet, in the lack of any secure support, must rest upon the transient mindset and milieu of the individual philosopher. This becomes particularly striking within the work of Plato, who is at once, in his theory of Forms, the most ambitious, and, in his modes of thinking and writing, one of the most idiosyncratic, of the luminaries of the western canon. So great personal interest has always attached to his so-called 7thLetter, which gives a long account both of the origins of his political philosophy, and of his attempts to put it to some practical purpose. According to the writer, what ultimately weighed with him in consenting to visit the city of Syracuse at the invitation of its tyrant Dionysius II was the following thought: 'If anyone ever was to attempt to realize these principles of law and government, now was the time to try, since it was only necessary to win over a single man and I should have accomplished all the good I dreamed of' (328bc, tr. Morrow). What we have is either an apologia pro vita sua, ostensibly addressed to friends of the dead Dion trying to make the best of his legacy, or, as Myles Burnyeat rather supposes, another's attempt 'to make a tragedy in epistolary form out of Plato's own life'. If the second holds, we have a work to be read as literature that is of some curiosity but of little philosophical significance.
The present compilation is itself a touching tribute to contingency and mutability. It arises out of a joint seminar that Burnyeat gave with Michael Frede at Oxford in Michaelmas 2001; since then one has died, and one is still with us. Dominic Scott has now, with the assistance of Carol Atack, edited (and in part annotated) the materials that survive from that collaboration. It was intended initially that Frede's role should be to oppose, Burnyeat's to defend, the letter's authenticity. In the event, their arguments turned...