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I N T R O D U C T O R Y Internal and External Connections A very good way to read Plato is, perhaps, the way Jacob Klein stunningly exemplifies.1 He reads each dialogue as it is presented to us by Plato, and pauses at each ambiguity to identify the different and often incompatible ways of understanding statements and interchanges, until the specific way divergent possible meanings accumulate begins itself to indicate how one should understand the dialogue as a whole. This is not the approach I take here. I begin with an idea of what Plato’s standpoint is and try to show that this idea fits. This is more like the approach in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s exploration of Plato’s Philebus, in the first half of which, he writes, ‘‘The task was . . . to make the horizon of Plato’s philosophizing stand out,’’ in the service of ‘‘the interpretation of the Philebus which I undertake in the second.’’2 It is an important part of my discussion that I do not leave it there. Apart from the need to justify my approach, the idea of an ‘‘approach’’ at all is rightly questionable to many philosophers, since it suggests that we can arbitrarily pick and choose where we start and how we come to understand things. In fact what I want to say by using the idea of approach, and what I argue Plato similarly wanted to say, cannot be understood without first appreciating why these philosophers are right to reject the idea of an ‘‘approach.’’ I therefore discuss at various points the significance of the present approach in the light of the idea of ‘‘approach’’ itself.3 One possible preliminary justification for this alternative way of reading —which is in fact a more traditional, ‘‘doctrinaire’’ approach—is that truth, including the truth about Plato’s dialogues, might be such that one can think from the same place as Plato did, from the independent source of truth, rather than trying to get access to it exclusively from his writings or from a tradition of thought and writings.4 As Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, ‘‘it shows great folly . . . to suppose that one can transmit or acquire clear and certain knowledge of an art through the medium of writing, or that written words can do more than remind the reader of what he al-   Ideas of Truth and Knowledge ready knows on any given subject.’’5 If Plato’s writing of the dialogues is to have any sense, then, it presupposes—and in this dialogue explicitly suggests —that one can find the same truth without those dialogues. (It is true that this explicit statement is only made by a character, and only one character , in a single dialogue. But as I indicate early in the introduction to the book as a whole [see note  there], Plato was aware of the need to take cogent positions into account whatever their source, so there is some basis for taking this statement seriously.) In fact, since Plato’s dialogues have a great deal to do with the search for truth, there is in any event a large overlap between the orientation toward truth in general, without reliance on Plato’s dialogues, and the orientation toward the truth about the dialogues themselves. This is captured in the ambiguity of the genitive in the phrase, ‘‘the truth of Plato’s dialogues.’’ Plato presents Socrates as having relied on a guiding daimonion or divine spirit.6 Perhaps this guiding voice emerged from such a general source of truth. (As always where there is a conflict concerning what is said to be real, the choice of language or articulation is very important. If one says, ‘‘what Socrates regarded as a daimonion,’’ one suggests that it might not really have been that. One is already biased toward a certain strongly particular interpretation of the reality one represents here. If, on the other hand, one says, ‘‘the daimonion emerged,’’ one suggests that it was definitely a daimonion. One is already biased toward another strongly particular interpretation of the reality in question. This is just the difficulty of important articulation that I argue Plato resolved, and with far-reaching consequences for other kinds of problems.) It is also perhaps this source that Wittgensteinian philosophers invoke when they use (or used to use) the otherwise redundant phrase: ‘‘I want to say.’’ In this way they meaningfully acknowledge—whether conscious of...

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