Plato's Literary Garden: How to Read a Platonic Dialogue

by Kenneth M. Sayre

Plato's dialogues are universally acknowledged as standing among the masterworks of the Western philosophic tradition. What most readers do not know, however, is that Plato also authored a public letter in which he unequivocally denies ever having written a work of philosophy. If Plato did not view his written dialogues as works of philosophy, how did he conceive them, and how should readers view them? In Plato's Literary Garden , Kenneth M. Sayre brings over thirty years of Platonic scholarship to bear on these questions, arguing that Plato did not intend the dialogues to serve as repositories of philosophic doctrine, but instead composed them as teaching instruments.

Genres: Philosophy

318 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1995

Reviews

[Jeremy]

In late 2017 / early 2018, I used Sayre's structure of Platonic dialogues in my analysis of Book 8 in Milton's Paradise Lost (dissertation Chapter 4).