Journal of the History of Philosophy

Many readers of Plato find it difficult to figure out what the author is really arguing in his works. Unlike other philosophical writing, most of Plato’s works are dialogues, which causes difficulty because Plato does not clearly endorse any one of the characters as his spokesman. In order to overcome this, readers should presumably exercise their own reason when reading Plato’s dialogues in order to find out what the author’s main idea is. In fact, this is exactly what Plato expects from the readers of his dialogues. He does not let his readers sit idly and read passively. Rather, they should carefully and critically analyze his arguments, actively participate in the conversation between the interlocutors, and find the main points of the discussion, in order to criticize each character’s position and eventually formulate their own arguments. The readers of Plato’s dialogues are meant to take part in philosophical conversations orchestrated by their author, whose intention is to lead his readers into philosophical projects.

In this book, Mary Louise Gill argues that the readers of Plato’s trilogy—Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman, the conversation between the Visitor and young Athenian philosophers—are expected to do such philosophical exercises. They will be able to make better sense of these works of Plato only when they grasp the author’s intentions and work out the arguments for themselves, eventually coming to understand what Plato ultimately suggests through these dialogues.

Gill begins with an old question: why did not Plato ever write the Philosopher, the dialogue to which he alludes in several places as the final part of a supposed tetralogy? Many answers have been suggested: some argue that Plato did not have time to write the Philosopher in the final stages of his career; others that the philosopher has already been revealed in the search for the sophist in the Sophist; others still that Plato intentionally did not write the Philosopher because it is located at the core of his so-called “Unwritten Doctrine.” Gill thinks, however, that Plato intentionally leaves the Philosopher unwritten so that the readers can find Plato’s philosopher while reading the trilogy, from which one can grasp the content of the “unwritten” dialogue. In other words, with a pedagogical aim in mind, Plato deliberately hides pieces of information and signposts of the true nature of his philosopher throughout the three dialogues; instead, he expects his readers and students to engage with the texts, to uncover clues and to reconstruct the project by themselves, and to become philosophers along the way. Gill argues that the second part of the Parmenides establishes a good dialectical pattern that should serve as a model in the philosophical training of any student. While reading the Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman, students at last become philosophers by mastering Plato’s dialectic and solving the puzzle in the trilogy, revealing who the philosopher is.

After considering the trial and error involved in discovering the nature of the philosophical exercise in the Parmenides, knowledge in the Theaetetus, not-being in the Sophist, and the true face of the Statesman, Gill argues that the subject matter of the Philosopher is what students of Plato’s philosophy should ultimately be engaged with. Specialists in other branches of the theoretical sciences study being from several angles while disregarding its irrelevant attributes, but Plato’s philosophos studies being as such. This does not mean that [End Page 675] being is a genus of which the others are species. Rather, being is a structural kind, which extends through all other kinds and characterizes them from inside. And other beings, in possessing their categorical as well as structural content, have being as their structural core. Unlike specialists in other disciplines who see being in terms of its own contents, then, Plato’s philosopher is interested in wisdom about all beings, and tries to understand the nature of things by the knowledge of being.

In order to support her claim about the nature of...