ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a short history of Platonic scholarship emerging from the analytic, conservative hermeneutic, and Continental traditions, all of which can be linked with doctrinal, esoteric, or skeptical readings that ignore certain elements within the dialogues. What is termed “Third Way” Platonic scholarship, which is a non-doctrinal approach to Plato’s dialogues, is further explained and set within the context of these traditions and, more accurately, steers a new course between them. The chapter provides an analysis of Plato in the classrooms of both philosophy and educational foundations, with the aim of teasing out the impact that doctrinal readings have on the students’ education and understanding of Plato’s Socrates. For example, I look briefly at the contemporary efforts to instill Socrates in the classroom through the application or employment of either the so-called Socratic Method or Socratic Seminar, an issue that will receive more attention in the next chapter. The chapter concludes with a non-doctrinal approach for conceiving Plato’s Socrates in education that seeks to avoid the problem of Platonism, opening the discussion concerning Third Way interpretation that structures the reading of a Socratic education in the subsequent chapters.
