The Guardians in Action : Plato the Teacher and the Post-Republic Dialogues From Timaeus to Theaetetus

If you’ve ever wondered why Plato staged Timaeus as a kind of sequel to Republic , or who its unnamed missing fourth might be; or why he joined Critias to Timaeus , and whether or not that strange dialogue is unfinished; or what we should make of the written critique of writing in Phaedrus , and of that dialogue’s apparent lack of unity; or what is the purpose of the long discussion of the One in the second half of Parmenides , and how it relates to the objections made to the Theory of Forms in its first half; or if the revisionists or unitarians are right about Philebus , and why its Socrates seems less charming than usual, or whether or not Cratylus takes place after Euthyphro , and whether its far-fetched etymologies accomplish any serious philosophical purpose; or why the philosopher Socrates describes in the central digression of Theaetetus is so different from Socrates himself; then you will enjoy reading the continuation of William H. F. Altman’s Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lexington; 2012), where he considers the pedagogical connections behind “the post- Republic dialogues” from Timaeus to Theaetetus in the context of “the Reading Order of Plato’s dialogues.” In this book, William H. F. Altman considers the pedagogical connections behind the post-Republic dialogues from Timaeus to Theaetetus in the context of their Reading Order.