In the Beginning: The Socratic Turn in Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues

Abstract

Catherine Zuckert's Plato's Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues presents the dramatic order of the dialogues as the narrative arc of Socrates's philosophical investigations. Focusing on the opening chapters of the work, I consider the place in this dramatic order of Socrates's intellectual autobiography in the Phaedo, Symposium, and Apology and his famous turn from the study of the heavens to the study of the human things. I examine in particular Zuckert's account of the problem of the cause or causes of the whole that motivated this turn and the doctrine of the ideas in the inquiry that followed it.