This second Plato book of mine treats the three dialogues, Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium, in which Plato showed how a young Socrates became the mature philosopher of all the dialogues. Plato structured these three dialogues to contain events of recovery: each reaches back from a later time to an earlier time in order to recover a stage in Socrates’ becoming, all three stages occurring before what Plato made the chronologically first dialogue, the Protagoras, which he set in 434 when Socrates was 35. Of the three stages that Plato isolated, Socrates himself reports how he began with natural ... More

This second Plato book of mine treats the three dialogues, Phaedo, Parmenides, and Symposium, in which Plato showed how a young Socrates became the mature philosopher of all the dialogues. Plato structured these three dialogues to contain events of recovery: each reaches back from a later time to an earlier time in order to recover a stage in Socrates’ becoming, all three stages occurring before what Plato made the chronologically first dialogue, the Protagoras, which he set in 434 when Socrates was 35. Of the three stages that Plato isolated, Socrates himself reports how he began with natural philosophy and then turned to a “second sailing” which led him to transcendent forms (Phaedo), and Socrates reports the final stage which peaks in a comprehensive ontology (Symposium). Understanding the first and third stages depends on the Parmenides, the pivotal dialogue which Socrates does not report. It recovers an event of unlearning that has profound implications for understanding the mature Socrates: old Parmenides showed nineteen year old Socrates that transcendent forms are rationally untenable. The Parmenides contains the implicit challenge to understand how Socrates can still use transcendent forms in his maturity as in the Phaedo and Republic. The Parmenides also contains a “gymnastic” of logical exercises through which alone Socrates can gain the true understanding of forms, the second and indispensable stage: understanding understanding itself. In this installment in the new history of philosophy made possible by Friedrich Nietzsche, I show how Socrates’ epistemology and ontology are akin to Nietzsche’s.