The Philosopher In Plato's Statesman ─ Together with "Dialectical Education and Unwritten Teachings in Plato's Statesman"

In the Statesman, Plato brings together - only to challenge and displace - his own crowning contributions to philosophical method, political theory, and drama: not irrepressible Socrates, now relegated to the status of silent observer, but the nameless Visitor from Elea challenges his own most sophisticated practice of collection and bifurcatory division by dry humor, a cosmological myth, and the abandonment of bifurcation for a seemingly unprincipled process of distinctions; and in the process he displaces the idea of the philosopher-king, recalled by his opening portrayal of the ruler as a shepherd of the human flock, first with the figure of the weaver and then with the rule of law.
In his 1980 study, reprinted here, Mitchell Miller deploys both literary theory and conceptual analysis in order to expose the philosophical, political, and pedagogical conflict that is the underlying context of the dialogue, with the consequence that its chaotic variety of movements now come to light as a carefully harmonized act of realizing the mean.

Mitchell Miller is professor of philosophy at Vassar College.