Plato and the Elements of Dialogue examines Plato’s use of the three necessary elements of dialogue: character, time, and place. By identifying and taking up striking employments of these features from throughout Plato’s work, this book seeks to map their functions and importance. By focusing on the Symposium, Cratylus, and Republic, this book shows three ways that characters can be related to what they do and what they say. Next, the book takes up ‘displacement’ by focusing on the Hippias Major, arguing that individual characters can be expanded by the repeated practice of asking them to consider a question from a point of view other than their own. This ties into the treatments of ‘thinking’ in the Theaetetus and Sophist. The Parmenides, Lysis, and Philebus are examined to come to a better understanding of the functions of the settings (times/places) of Plato’s dialogues, while a reading of the beginning of the of the Phaedo shows how Plato can expand the settings of the dialogues by using ‘frames’ in order to direct his readers. Last, this book takes up the ‘critique of writing’ that closes the Phaedrus.

Plato's philosophical dialogues can be seen as his creation of a new genre. Plato borrows from, as well as rejects, earlier and contemporary authors, and he is constantly in conversation with established genres, such as tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, and rhetoric in a variety of ways. This intertextuality reinforces the relevance of material from other types of literary works, as well as a general knowledge of classical culture in Plato's time, and the political and moral environment that Plato addressed, when reading his dramatic dialogues. The authors of Philosophy as Drama show that any interpretation of these works must include the literary and narrative dimensions of each text, as much as serious the attention given to the progression of the argument in each piece. Each dialogue is read on its own merit, and critical comparisons of several dialogues explore the differences and likenesses between them on a dramatic as well as on a logical level. This collection of essays moves debates in Plato scholarship forward when it comes to understanding both particular aspects of Plato's dialogues and the approach itself. Containing 11 chapters of close readings of individual dialogues, with 2 chapters discussing specific themes running through them, such as music and sensuousness, pleasure, perception, and images, this book displays the range and diversity within Plato's corpus.

Traditional Plato scholarship, in the English-speaking world, has assumed that Platonic dialogues are merely collections of arguments. Inevitably, the question arises: If Plato wanted to present collections of arguments, why did he write dialogues instead of treatises? Concerned about this question, some scholars have been experimenting with other, more contextualized ways of reading the dialogues. This anthology is among the first to present these new approaches as pursued by a variety of scholars. As such, it offers new perspectives on Plato as well as a suggestive view of Plato scholarship as something of a laboratory for historians of philosophy generally. The essays gathered here each examine vital aspects of Plato’s many methods, considering his dialogues in relation to Thucydides and Homer, narrative strategies and medical practice, images and metaphors. They offer surprising new research into such much-studied works as The Republic as well as revealing views of lesser-known dialogues like the Cratylus and Philebus. With reference to thinkers such as Heidegger, Gadamer, and Sartre, the authors place the Platonic dialogues in an illuminating historical context. Together, their essays should reinvigorate the scholarly examination of the way Plato’s dialogues “work”—and should prompt a reconsideration of how the form of Plato’s philosophical writing bears on the Platonic conception of philosophy.

Challenges the idea that Plato is a secular thinker, exploring the interaction of philosophy and Greek religion in the dialogues.