This is a commentary on Plato's Cratylus. It is a running commentary, because it is not organized by lemmata, but rather proceeds by quoting chunks of text (in my own translation) and then going on to explain them in detail. It is, alas, not a complete commentary, because there are some parts of the dialogue which I comment on only selectively, as I explain at the beginning of chapter 5. It is primarily a philosophical commentary, because what I am chiefly interested in is the purport of the theses advanced in the dialogue and the structure and worth of the arguments for and against them. But it is also a philological commentary, because along the way I discuss many matters of textual criticism and interpretation – some relevant to our philosophical understanding of the dialogue, some (usually confined to footnotes) perfectly irrelevant. Actually, I am afraid all I can say about my choice of focus is that as I was writing I tended, almost unwittingly, to imagine myself reading the dialogue in an open-ended seminar free from any sort of schedule, whose sole concern was to discuss anything that might seem interesting about a given portion of text before moving on to the next one. And so it is that, finally, this is a very long commentary – something for which I won't apologize.

As a consequence of the last feature, the book has been long (everyone around me says too long) in the writing.