ABSTRACT
First, there is a paper-not published by Austin, nor indeed written by him exactly as it now stands in his Philosophical Papers-on the interpretation of the Line and the Cave in Plato’s Republic1. This consists in part of a paper written in the 1930s in comment on a paper by Sir David Ross, supplemented and amended, particularly in its later pages, from notes made for a class held in the late 1940s. The piece well displays Austin’s characteristic care and scholarship and good sense in the interpretation of a text; but it is carefully restricted to the sole task of elucidating what Plato meant, and I think it need not be further discussed in what is not a book about Plato.
