Lesley Brown’s chapter ‘Do Forms Play the Role of Concepts in Late Plato?’ starts by noting a major issue of controversy concerning the Forms in the Middle Dialogues, namely whether Forms are explanatory properties whose role is to account for why things are the way they are and are therefore the objects of philosophical inquiry and knowledge, or whether Forms are concepts whose role is to explain everyday thinking and discourse. On the assumption that the former option best captures the role of Forms in Plato’s so-called Middle Dialogues, Brown addresses the question whether Plato’s later dialogues manifest a shift in emphasis such that the latter interpretation gains greater prominence. In her view, even though Plato’s later dialogues show increasing interest in matters of language and meaning, and hence may perhaps be taken to show a somewhat greater interest in the role Forms or Kinds play in our everyday thinking and discourse, nonetheless the prominence of the method of division in these works underscores that the Forms are primarily properties discoverable by philosophical inquiry, not everyday concepts or meanings.

It is often held that only by the time of the late Sophist did Plato discover a way of dealing with puzzles about the possibility of false judgement and false statement. Earlier dialogues such as Euthydemus and Theaetetus which introduce the puzzles are thought to labour under assumptions about how language relates to reality, born of inexperience in semantics, that stood in his way. Here it is argued that in both those dialogues Plato is in fact doing something subtler than captivity to a crude picture of the way language works would allow. A more attentive reading of these two texts makes it clear that he has already identified the structural relation between subject and predicate as the key: not only to understanding how false judgement is possible, but through that to bigger questions about the relation of thought and language to the world in general. The Euthydemus, in particular, shows us how many more ways there are for an argument to go wrong than are dreamed of in the logic books. It even suggests that a failure in logic may sometimes be simultaneously a failure in love.

How far is it possible to reconstruct the content of the ‘art of citizenship’ (politikê technê) professed by Protagoras in the dialogue Protagoras? Some commentators have claimed that Protagoras’ statements about the technê are incoherent. Examining this claim, Hussey argues that, while Protagoras can be defended on the charge of incoherence, his exposition of the nature and content of the technê he professes to possess and teach is radically incomplete in several ways. The question then arises whether the Theaetetus can be used to fill in the gaps that Protagoras of the Protagoras left for good practical reasons. If Protagoras’ remarks on truth and wisdom and the ‘changing of perceptions’ in the Theaetetus are taken in a pragmatist way, they imply a conception of a ‘technê of citizenship’ that is capable of improving/transforming human nature, and creating a public political consensus and a stable democratic society. There are many illuminating parallels to be drawn throughout, between the claims of Plato’s Protagoras for his ‘political art’ and the description of the medical art given in the pseudo-Hippocratic essay On Ancient Medicine. (It is assumed, but not argued, that Plato’s Protagoras is a substantially faithful portrait of the historical Protagoras.)