ABSTRACT
Since Platonic scholarship, seriously pursued, can easily become a fulltime occupation, not many philosophers have been prepared to leave their main field of interest, even temporarily, to raise historical questions about the beginnings of their subject. The most useful contribution philosophers can make to Platonic studies is to ask questions in the hope that specialist scholars may find the answers. This chapter asks one such question. It is a question which is extremely hard to make clear, and to distinguish from other apparently similar questions. The chapter suggests a tentative answer to it, and even considers what light is shed on question by the text of dialogues. It illustrates the character of question by asking another question which is of the same kind, but to which the answer is fairly obvious. Suppose we were to ask, in the context of Republic VI and VII, what was actually happening in Plato's experience when he was engaging in what he calls eikasia.
