The main claim of this paper is that Plato's views on social and individual good as well as his criticism of democracy can be best understood as a conscious attempt to contrast with Periclean conceptions of freedom and democracy a new point of view. It will be argued that it is a mistake to see Plato's view as either democratic or authoritarian. An adequate understanding of Plato will focus on some difficult questions concerning the relationship between freedom and knowledge; questions that are rarely if ever faced clearly today. The Platonic conception and its clash with Pericles raises also some important and still unresolved questions about human motivation.

Recently, a number of attempts have been made to understand the analogy between craft and virtue1 in the early and middle dialogues. Interpreting the craft analogy in different ways, these attempts have reached different conclusions about the place of the analogy in Plato's maturer moral philosophy. Some even deny that the analogy has any place in that philosophy. This paper shows that the craft analogy is central to understanding the moral philosophy outlined in the first four books of the Republic.

In Republic X.605c-607a, Plato makes what he says is the greatest accusation against imitative poetry: ‘We have not yet made the greatest accusation against it [sc. mimetikē ]. For the fact that it is able to harm reasonable people, except for a very few, is surely most terrible’ (605c6-8). What follows is a subtle theory of audience psychology. Plato accuses the poet of creating special circumstances in which knowledge of what constitutes moral virtue is not an adequate protection against wrong-doing. The poet does not merely give us false beliefs, as a sophist does, he attacks the very order of the soul.

This new charge depends on those preceding it, in which the poet was said to make things ‘third from the truth’ and to deceive the ignorant in a way analogous to that in which the painter makes children and fools think that a painted carpenter is a real carpenter, if they see it from afar (598c). We must begin by examining this important analogy.

There is a problem about belief and knowledge in Plato's epistemology that has exercised serious students of Plato only to settle into a recent orthodoxy. Guthrie characterizes the problem and its current resolution this way: ‘In the Meno doxa appeared to be a dim apprehension of the same objects (Forms and the necessary truths of mathematics) of which knowledge is a clear and complete understanding … in the Republic each is directed to different objects, knowledge to the Forms and doxa to the sensible world alone … at least the opinion seems now to prevail that on the relationship between doxa and knowledge Meno and Republic are irreconcilable, and exhibit a complete change of mind on Plato's part.'

Several recent papers dealing with Plato's position on the imperfection of the phenomenal world draw heavily on the differences between two kinds of predicates in order to show the following: (1) In the middle dialogues, Plato posits Forms only (or primarily) as referents of what the writers call incomplete predicates (e.g., relational or attributive ones). He does not posit Forms as referents for complete predicates (e.g., sortal or mass predicates). (2) When interpreters ignore the differences between these kinds of predicates, they ascribe too radical a view regarding the imperfection of the phenomenal world to the middle dialogues. (3) The ontology of these dialogues includes sensible particulars which retain their identity over time even though they are continually changing in some respect or other.

In this paper I examine a much discussed passage of the Timaeus. This passage contains one of the most important descriptions of Plato's ontology to be found in all the dialogues. The ontological scheme there described differs from that presented in the middle Platonic dialogues in that a third sort of entity, the Receptacle or space, is added to the two classes of things familiar to readers of the Phaedo and Republic: Being (i.e. the Forms) and Becoming (the phenomenal world). The introduction of the Receptacle into Plato's ontology enables Plato to clarify the relation between the orders of Being and Becoming in a way not otherwise possible. When the relation between the Forms and their phenomenal counterparts has been clarified, I shall argue, it becomes clear that the Theory of Forms as presented in the Timaeus is in fact a coherent metaphysical theory, one which is not susceptible to the Third Man Argument. This fact in turn bears (although somewhat indirectly) on the vexed question of the place of the Timaeus in the chronology of Plato's works.

Hector-Neri Castaneda has argued that in the Phaedo we can find a logically viable Platonic theory of relations. I am in agreement with this view. Furthermore, I find there to be a clarification of Plato's theory in the ‘worst difficulty’ argument of the Parmenides (133a-135a).

Philebus 5Sc-62a has traditionally been viewed as one of the more likely passages in the late Platonic dialogues where the theory of Ideas may be construed to be present in the same manner as in the Republic with its sharply dualistic epistemology and ontology. There is certainly a similarity of language between the passage and the Republic: in the Philebus the pure, clear, certain/stable, true, unalloyed, eternally existing, always changlessly the same, really real objects of the philosopher's reason and knowledge sound like Platonic Ideas. Roger A. Shiner, following in the steps of G.E.L. Owen, has offered four new arguments which attempt to show that in this passage Plato in fact is not committed to the theory of Ideas in the form in which it appears in the Republic, that in this passage there is no Republic-style gulf between knowledge and opinion, reality and becoming. I wish to argue that none of these arguments succeed.