Plato and the Post-Socratic Dialogue: The Return to the Philosophy of Nature

Charles H. Kahn

nov 2013 · Cambridge University Press

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Plato's late dialogues have often been neglected because they lack the literary charm of his earlier masterpieces. Charles Kahn proposes a unified view of these diverse and difficult works, from the Parmenides and Theaetetus to the Sophist and Timaeus, showing how they gradually develop the framework for Plato's late metaphysics and cosmology. The Parmenides, with its attack on the theory of Forms and its baffling series of antinomies, has generally been treated apart from the rest of Plato's late work. Kahn shows that this perplexing dialogue is the curtain-raiser on Plato's last metaphysical enterprise: the step-by-step construction of a wider theory of Being that provides the background for the creation story of the Timaeus. This rich study, the natural successor to Kahn's earlier Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, will interest a wide range of readers in ancient philosophy and science.

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Charles H. Kahn is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. His publications include Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology, 3rd edition (1994), The Art and Thought of Heraclitus: A New Arrangement and Translation of the Fragments with Literary and Philosophical Commentary (1979), Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (1997) and Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: A Brief History (2001).