ABSTRACT
Plato’s dialogues are artfully crafted discussions that literally lay the “foundation” for the philosophical tradition in Western culture. In a rather pleasant manner, Plato reifies conceptual insights in the structure of human thought. Plato represents one “face” that is similar to that which Foucault describes when he discusses how the character of “Man” changes with the ebbing tides of history. By professionalizing philosophy, Plato invests philosophy with an agenda—the historical task of discovering the metaphysical underpinnings of important concepts such as Truth, Justice, Ethics, and other things concerning world as it is. In effect, Plato’s intellectual strategy is itself an instance of rhetoric; it infuses a particular hierarchy and value system into Western thought. Professionalized philosophy, from Plato on, has had an important role to play in this cultural dynamic, for it is the art or method by which history and society can be known. In contrast, philosophy, in the Platonic tradition, has been conceptualized as a “tribunal of reason.”
