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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2016
TO give this chapter this heading is to beg the whole question, for the champions of the Unwritten Doctrines as the essence of Plato’s philosophy maintain that a consciously formed and systematic approach to Being underlies all outward expressions in the dialogues and offers the key to all Plato’s thought. Such a view came to expression in the work of two German scholars, whose influence on their contemporaries was great and who, almost unwillingly, founded a kind of ‘school’ of Platonic philosophy. The most important work was that of Hans-Joachim Krämer, Arete bei Platon und Aristoteles (Heidelberg, 1959), supported by his Die Ursprung der Geistesmetaphysik (Amsterdam, 1964). The other really important book is Konrad Gaiser’s Platons Ungeschriebene Lehre (Stuttgart, 1963), which is rather less firmly dogmatic and an easier introduction to the questions at issue for those with German.
1. Vlastos reviewed this book in Gnomon 41 (1963), 641—55. The review is reprinted in his own Platonic Studies, 374—98. This review demolishes some of the evidence on which Krämer’s theory is based and has often been regarded in Britain and the U.S.A. as demolishing the whole position of the school. It is perhaps wiser to treat the victim as mauled but not necessarily despatched. The plausibility that can be given to the case stated is not dependent on the validity of Krämer’s interpretation of a passage in Sextus Empiricus. I have tried briefly and sketchily here to state the general case against the position taken, while admitting fully the value of such a book as Konrad Gaiser’s in turning our attention to unduly neglected material. But anyone really concerned with the controversy must take full account of Vlastos’s review.
2. I take the Laws to have been begun earlier though not published until after Plato’s death.