Reading and Writing Plato

W did Plato write dialogues? How should his dialogues be read (does the literary form matter, for example, to our getting at the heart of what Plato is saying)? These questions are now familiar in contemporary Plato scholarship, and their answers—which undoubtedly are interconnected—are the subject of lively and fascinating exploration. Any doubt that Platonic studies -ourishes would quickly be put to rest by the four books under review here. It was once thought that attention to the “dramatic dimension” of Plato’s literary-philosophical productions was the province of two much despised schools of thought: “the Straussians,” and “the Continentals.” The .rst of these was viewed as advocating a dangerous combination of esotericism (the idea that somehow Plato’s meaning is not on the surface of the dialogues, but concealed in them, as though they were a cryptogram), elitism (the idea that the true Plato is only available to