Abstract

Professor Beversluis says that this book is a re-reading of Platos early dialogues from the point of view of the characters with whom Socrates engages in debate. He says that unlike existing studies, which are thoroughly dismissive of the interlocutors and reduce them to the status of mere mouthpieces, this book takes them seriously and treats them as genuine intellectual opponents whose views are often more defensible than commentators have standardly thought. Beversluis says his purpose is not to summarize their positions or the arguments of the dialogues in which they appear, much less to produce a series of biographical sketches, but to investigate the phenomenology of philosophical disputation as it manifests itself in the early dialogues. He thinks that this investigation demonstrates the truth of his thesis that Socrates frequent use of faulty arguments and unscrupulous dialectical tactics calls in question his announced seriousness and concern for the souls of his fellows.