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Robinson, Thomas More
University of Toronto
The Dialogue Form and the “Developmental” Approach to Plato
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Keywords:
Demiurge, developmentalism, dialogues, essentialism, functionalism, immortality, justice, Laws, Parmenides, Phaedo, Plato, reason, Republic, soul, Theory of Forms, Timaeus, tri-partition
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This paper asks the question: where - if anywhere - is Plato
himself in the dialogues? Its conclusion is that he is to be found in three positions consistently maintained and defended by his lead-interlocutors across a lifetime of writing: essentialism, functionalism (teleology), and the belief that the human soul is distinct from the body, survives the death of the body, and is in its rational part or aspect immortal. For the rest, a number of ideas which are canvassed at particular points of his writing lifetime by various interlocutors (including some that have gone on to become very famous) are simply that - ideas, which form part of his ongoing search, through dialogue, for the truth of things, but are not, as it turns out, ideas which he himself adhered to without question till the end. Among such ideas is the famous Theory of Forms as transcendental essences, a theory which, I argue, is prominent in his ‘middle’ period of writing but has very likely been abandoned by the time he writes his last dialogue, the
Laws. The same goes, I maintain, for the famous doctrine of the tri-partition of soul; it is a prominent feature of the middle dialogues, but seems to have been discarded by the time he writes the
Laws. Concomitant with this, the celebrated doctrine of justice as a harmony of the three parts of soul has, in the
Laws, also apparently been jettisoned, and replaced by something much closer to the very modern-sounding theory of justice-as-fairness.
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