ABSTRACT
We shall probably understand Plato’s philosophy best if we regard him as working in the first place under the influence of two related motives. He wished first of all to take up Socrates’s task at the point where Socrates had had to leave it, to consolidate his master’s teaching and defend it against inevitable questioning. But in this he was not acting solely from motives of personal affection or respect. It fitted in with his second motive, which was to defend, and to render worth defending, the idea of the city-state as an independent political, economic, and social unit. For it was by accepting and developing Socrates’s challenge to the Sophists that Plato thought this wider aim could be most successfully accomplished.
