62 T H E C L A S S I CA L R E V I E W

dangerous. W.’s claims here are just as odd. She never directly addresses Socrates’ descrip-
tion of his philosophical mission as divinely ordered or commanded by god. Here it is
natural to see a parallel to the philosophers’ agreement to rule in Republic VII.
Philosophers have benefited from the city’s laws – especially by receiving an education
that prevents their corruption into extreme vice – so a legal requirement for philosophers
to rule is just. Socrates has benefited in the same way from his daimonion and other divine
interventions, which makes it just for god to command him to philosophise with anyone
(not just with his friends). Perhaps it is to avoid this obvious parallel that W. says, per-
versely, that we need not take Socrates’ talk of divinities and gods literally (pp. 143–5).
Chapter 5 argues that Socrates never seriously defends justice as profitable for the just
person; rather, he defends moderation while calling it ‘justice’. W. offers arguments for this
claim, but her interpretation seems driven largely by her own ethical views. She is so con-
fident that justice is by its nature the virtue that profits others and not the just person that
she cannot imagine Socrates disagreeing. W.’s moral confidence guides interpretation ear-
lier in the book as well. Philosophers by design start their city by sending everyone over
ten to the country (540e), ‘an alarmingly monstrous procedure’ that shows they are not just.
Philosophers by nature are just, so Socrates’ reference to the ‘clean slate’ they require for
governing (501a) cannot anticipate the later plan and must be understood metaphorically
(pp. 117–20). Likewise, if X does Y a favour expecting reciprocal benefit, justice cannot
require Y to reciprocate – certainly not as X specifies. Hence, Socrates cannot seriously
argue that if the city calls on philosophers to rule in return for their education and upkeep,
justice requires that they obey (pp. 100–2).
This review only touches the surface of the difficulties – both internal and textual, on
both a small and large scale – that W.’s interpretation faces. To the last page, which says
that Socrates would ‘choose justice where there is no justice to be chosen’ in the afterlife
(p. 218), the book makes puzzling claims and offers unsatisfying arguments. It takes a
majestically self-assured tone, brimming with rhetorical questions. The book is at its
best when it raises puzzles or calls attention to passages that are sometimes papered
over. The interpretation that W. builds around those passages and her proposed solutions
to the puzzles hold considerably less interest.
The University of Tennessee C L E R K S H AW
jshaw15@utk.edu

PLATO’S PHILOSOPHOS
G I L L ( M . L . ) Philosophos. Plato’s Missing Dialogue. Pp. x + 290,
figs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Cased, £30, US$55. ISBN:
978-0-19-960618-4.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X13002333

Tantalising hints of a dialogue on the nature of the philosopher may be found at the begin-
ning of Plato’s Sophist (217a–b) and Statesman (257a–258b). Philosophos would have
been the final instalment of a trilogy. There is prima facie evidence that such a dialogue
was conceived, and the joint investigation of the Eleatic Stranger, Theaetetus and
Young Socrates is advertised as culminating in an account of the philosopher as a discern-
ible type, both distinct from and more important than the sophist and the statesman. Were a
manuscript of Philosophos to be discovered in a forgotten desert cave it would ascend
immediately to a prominent position among Plato’s dialogues.

The Classical Review 64.1 62–64 © The Classical Association (2014)

 T H E C L A S S I CA L R E V I E W 63
According to G. we should not hold out hope for such a discovery, for she thinks
Plato never intended to write a dialogue named Philosophos. Rather, he left to readers the
task of constructing an account of the philosopher’s nature using evidence strate-
gically disseminated in the series comprised of Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist and
Statesman. Dramatic links between the Theaetetus, Sophist and Statesman, along with cross-
referencing between all four of these dialogues, point to a portrait of the philosopher as an
expert in dialectic who seeks to understand the nature of things and helps others do the
same. G. also specifies the subject of a philosopher’s investigations (the form of being),
and the properly philosophical perspective on that subject (the structural core inside the nature
every being, ‘enabling it to fit together with other beings outside its specific nature’, p. 240).
G. begins with the Parmenides, in the first part of which Socrates is forced to confront
formidable theoretical difficulties that ensue when forms are conceived of as separate from
the particulars that participate in them. Much of the rest of the dialogue consists of
Parmenides going through a series of deductions about oneness; these are undergone in
order to illustrate the sort of exercises that constitute philosophical training. After complet-
ing exercises on oneness, a philosophical novice is encouraged to repeat the procedure for
being, sameness, difference and other general kinds. In the first four (of eight) deductions
undertaken to investigate oneness, G. detects a general pattern: (1) deduce the implications
of a positive hypothesis, that oneness is; (2) then deduce the implications of its negative
hypothesis, that oneness is not; (3) then deduce the implications of a middle way, that one-
ness both is and is not; (4) then develop a critical assessment of step three. This pattern,
G. maintains, is the template for an extended investigation of the form of being in the
Theaetetus, Sophist and Statesman.
It is necessary to read the three dialogues as a trilogy contributing to a single project in
order to follow the pattern G. outlines. (1) As part of its guiding investigation into know-
ledge, the Theaetetus explores the hypothesis about the nature of being; problems arise
because Heraclitean instability is presupposed in its conception, but indications of
Parmenidean stability suggest alternative routes of inquiry. (2) Because the sophist inhabits
the realm of non-being, the Sophist investigates the hypothesis that non-being has a kind of
being, explained there in terms of difference. (3) Still in the Sophist, the Battle of the Gods
(who champion being in terms of stability and rest) and Giants (who champion it in terms
of instability and change) is momentarily resolved by the children’s plea: accept both
together (249c–d; pp. 98–100, 205, 229–30). The resolution lasts only until the Eleatic
Stranger convinces Theaetetus that change and rest are jointly exhaustive opposites that
exclude one another; and while each of these opposites relates to being, the being of
change and being of rest must lie outside the specific natures of both. On G.’s reading,
the fourth step here is aporetic, and diagnosing the flaw in its formulation is crucial for
understanding the philosopher’s nature and subject. While non-being can be accounted
for in terms of difference, being itself is more elusive. Finally, the Statesman points the
way to differentiate the philosopher from the statesman and from other rivals.
Why did Plato not write a Philosopher? In G.’s opinion, the answer is primarily ped-
agogical. Withholding an explicit account of the philosopher encourages readers to refine
their own dialectical capacities as they assemble the evidence. Furthermore, an account of
the philosopher is not the only thing that needs to be discovered by carefully reading and
rereading the Parmenides–Theaetetus–Sophist–Statesman series. A deep problem with the
form of being runs throughout these dialogues. Readers must first uncover its presence,
then work their way towards its resolution. The crux of this problem comes in the
Sophist, where the Eleatic Stranger and Theaetetus posit an apparent but unreliable parity
between being and non-being. They locate the sophist in the dark region of non-being and
happen upon the philosopher in the light of being; when they solve the problem of non-
64 T H E C L A S S I CA L R E V I E W

being technically by analysing it in terms of difference, it appears at first that the problem
of being and the nature of the philosopher can be elucidated in a comparably straightfor-
ward manner. Not so, argues G., for the spatial metaphors by which being is related to
change and rest suggest misleadingly that change and rest are categorial opposites and
that being is outside both of them (i.e. being is a separate third thing, 250a–d); the
Aporia about Being results from treating being as an external attribute to both change
and rest, a result that echoes the fifth deduction of oneness in Parmenides (p. 211).
G. argues that, despite the initial treatment of change and rest as categorial forms, ulti-
mately readers are supposed to regard them as structural forms (p. 228). It is essential
for Plato’s project that his audience comes to see for itself both the Aporia about Being
and the evolving analysis that is indispensable for resolving it. All this camouflaging
and signposting serves a pedagogical purpose that, according to G., would have been
lost if Plato had simply written the Philosopher.
G.’s account of the form of being is patiently developed, and its wider implications are
nicely explained in the final pages. The form of being provides each being with its internal
stability, the enduring nature of which remains the same as it changes accidentally in its traffic
with other things outside its nature. (No summary can do justice to G.’s detailed account,
which takes up large parts of two chapters and an appendix.) Because being is structurally
implicit in all beings, the philosopher, whose focus is on being as such, can be distinguished
from specialists who study only a part of being (demarcated, e.g., as geometry, astronomy,
medicine, etc., p. 241). And because the philosopher’s work is guided by dialectic, this
study is sharply differentiated from the sophist’s unregulated indulgence in phantastikē
(p. 243). Moreover, G. thinks that the models used in the Sophist and Statesman are more
apt for the philosopher than for the sophist and statesman: angling has more in common
with the pursuit of wisdom than the hunting of young men; and the weaver expresses more
precisely the activity of weaving words into sentences, arguments and accounts than that
of intermingling moderate and courageous elements of the polis (p. 243).
G.’s exposition and analysis meet a very high standard. Anyone with an interest in Plato
will study Philosophos profitably. I am a little disappointed that she does not explain how
her portrait of the philosopher compares with the philosopher in the Republic, and that she
does not explore how her analysis of the form of being relates to Socrates’ remark in
Republic 6 that the good is prior to the forms and to being (509b). Perhaps these are matters
for another occasion. But anyone who tackles these issues will be well served by G. and her
very fine book.
Wilfrid Laurier University J O N AT H A N L AV E RY
jlavery@wlu.ca

ANCIENT RECEPTIONS OF PLATO

H U N T E R ( R . ) Plato and the Traditions of Ancient Literature. The Silent
Stream. Pp. viii + 279. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Cased, £60, US$99. ISBN: 978-1-107-01292-9.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X13002345

H.’s book is a wonderful addition to the burgeoning field of classical reception, all the
more so as it deals with a subject that has thus far failed to receive a systematic treatment.
The ‘traditions’ of the title are primarily those of the Second Sophistic, while the ‘silent
stream’ of the subtitle alludes to Longinus’ characterisation of the Platonic style as a

The Classical Review 64.1 64–66 © The Classical Association (2014)

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