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PLATO: EUTHYOEMUS, LYSIS, CHARMIDES. PROCEEDINGS OF THE V SYMPOSIUM PLATONICUM. Edited by THOMAS M. ROBINSON and LUC BRISSON. Sankt Augustin: Academia (International Plato Studies 13). 2000. Pp. viii, 400.
THIS VOLUME CENTERS ON three aporetic dialogues that seem to offer hints of concepts that appear in Phaedo, Republic, or Gorgias. A considerable number of the papers deal, in one way or another, with this theme, and several authors express support or opposition to the theory of Charles H. Kahn (Plato and the Socratic Dialogue [Cambridge 1996]), who argues that aporetic dialogues often refer in a "proleptic" way to ideas presented in more complex and more positive form elsewhere in the Platonic corpus. The papers are divided into sections for each of the dialogues, followed by a "Comprehensive" section at the end comprising a few essays that do not focus on a single dialogue. I will note the language for papers not in English.
It is interesting to observe that the papers on Euthydemus are the most numerous. Rosamund Kent Sprague includes some useful bibliography on recent scholarship, and she remarks that past scholarly neglect of this dialogue has begun to be remedied. Sprague reviews the attempts by herself and A. L. Peck to connect Euthydemus with concepts more fully developed in Parmenides, Sophist, and Theaetetus. Hayden Weir Ausland would counter such approaches and argues, though to me not convincingly (see A. N. Michelini, "Socrates Plays the Buffoon: Cautionary Propreptic," AJP 121 [2000] 509-535), that references in Euthydemus to the politike techne and to someone who sounds much like Isocrates are mere topoi; his warning, however, that one should avoid the temptation to combine the "now literary Plato with the developing doctrinal philosopher" (26) seems valid. Christopher Gill takes an even stronger stance, expressing doubts that a dialogue like Republic can ever be said to address the same problems posed in another dialogue, for example, Euthydemus.
In contrast, Charles H. Kahn's essay points to the way in which an unlikely outburst on dialectic by the young Clinias "explicitly marks as a mystery" (92) the apparent anticipation of ideas developed in Sophist and elsewhere. I would agree; but Kahn's last paragraph, which places Euthydemus in an "early" period, seems to illustrate Ausland's caveat. In a...