THE PHILOSOPHER IN PLATO'S STATESMAN is a trail-blazing work. When it first came out in 1980, Plato scholarship in English was dominated by two opposing paradigms. On one hand was an approach focused on individual arguments, with no concern for the dramatic setting in which an argument takes place. The other approach was preoccupied with dramatic details of the dialogues, with comparatively little attention to the arguments being developed along with them. In a manner recalling the middle section of the STATESMAN dealing with excess and defect, each approach overemphasized something the other neglected.

Mitchell Miller's book made its initial appearance as a bold challenge to this dichotomy of interpretive paradigms. As this book demonstrated once and for all, Plato's genius as a philosopher lies equally with his astounding powers of discursive reasoning and with his fascinating ability to cast his arguments in dramatic contexts that highlight their significance. In this respect, Miller's book stands as a mean between two extremes, reminiscent of the METRION by which excess and defect are supposed to be measured according to the midsection of the dialogue mentioned above.

The hallmark of Miller's moderating approach is his view that the Eleatic dialogues (THEAETETUS, PARMENIDES, SOPHIST, and STATESMAN) were intended to put young members of the Academy "on stage" before themselves (so he says elsewhere) and, thus situated, to help them learn from the performances of the youthful respondents. As described in Miller's Introduction of 1980, this process involves three (actually four) stages. First (i) is an "elicitation" of the young respondent's opinions on the issues at hand. Next comes (ii(a)) a "refutation" of these opinions by the main protagonist, followed by (ii(b)) a sequence casting "new …light" on the relevant issues. The final stage is (iii) a "resumption" of the discussion under the guidance of this reorienting insight, during which members of the audience are encouraged to join vicariously in resolving the aporia produced by (ii(a)). In Miller's reading of the STATESMAN, stage (i) consists in the elicitation of the notion of the shepherd-ruler, stage (ii(a)) in the myth of Cronus where that notion is refuted, (ii(b)) in the paradigm of the weaver providing the needed reorientation, and then stage (iii) in the resumption of the defining process in which "dividing by half" is replaced by non-dichotomous diairesis. While not every reader will agree with the lessons Miller himself draws from this approach, none should fail to be impressed by its interpretive power.

One mark of this power is its persistence, evident in the fact that Miller's own reading of the STATESMAN has become more penetrating and insightful over the years since the book was first published. Having been convinced in the mid-80s that the once strange-sounding doctrines attributed to Plato in Aristotle's METAPHYSICS could actually be found in certain late dialogues, Miller returned to his sources with a broader perspective taking these other late writings into account. The result was a series of shorter works of which 'Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teaching in Plato's STATESMAN' is aptly representative. As far as the STATESMAN itself is concerned, his most striking new thought is that the 15 kinds of art distinguished at the end of the dialogue taken together constitute a continuum, and hence can be considered an instance of the Unlimited as spelled out in the PHILEBUS. This makes way for an interpretation of the relation of these 15 kinds to the single form of Care they all instantiate as a case of the thesis attributed to Plato by Aristotle to the effect that sensible things are caused by the forms (here Care itself) and the Great and the Small (the Unlimited of the PHILEBUS). Other recent writings by Miller connect Aristotle's account of Plato with the PARMENIDES and the TIMAEUS as well. In the Preface of the present book, moreover, there is a riveting suggestion that this account might have to do with the so-called "longer way" studiously avoided in the REPUBLIC.

All this is exciting stuff. While Miller himself insists that his readings of these texts are to some extent tentative and represent work in progress, the interpretive pathway on which he has embarked has the potential for changing the face of scholarship on the late Platonic dialogues. Parmenides Press is to be commended for making these two important contributions available under a single cover.

—Kenneth Sayre
University of Notre Dame