ABSTRACT
In these respects, Book 1 resembles the dialogues of Plato’s first period of writing. Even in the philosophical positions he implicitly holds, this Socrates is as much like the Socrates of those dialogues as the one in Books 2-10 is like the Socrates of the other dialogues from Plato’s middle period. The early Socrates confines himself to moral issues, while the Platonic character (the middledialogue Socrates who is Plato’s mouthpiece) develops theories of politics, metaphysics, religion, psychology, and education. In the early dialogues Socrates unceasingly compares ethical knowledge to human arts or crafts (see pp. 34-5); later he seems to regard mathematics as the best sort of knowledge. The early Socrates disavows all knowledge, conducting his investigations as jousts with adversaries, while the Socrates of the middle period didactically lays out his theories before placid respondents. The early dialogues make the people Socrates talks to psychologically vivid and historically concrete, so that their theoretical beliefs grow out of their personalities and circumstances. Later the interlocutors fade into little more than dramatic formalities. By every criterion Book 1 should count as an early dialogue.
