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A Plato Scholar Responds to a Critic

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Okay, that headline may not be exactly "click bait." I'm glad you're with me anyway. 

 I believe I've mentioned in this blog at some point a book by a Plato scholar, Racanha Ramtekar, PLATO'S MORAL PSYCHOLOGY. 

 The book drew a review from Nicholas Smith, and that review drew in turn a riposte from Ramtekar. I'll quote just a bit of the latter here. 

 By way of background: it is a very common observation that the earlier dialogs of Plato take a very different point of view of morality and psychology than do later ones. One common contention is that Plato started off as a faithful follower of the historical Socrates, but then developed in different directions.

 This is sometimes called the "developmentalist" view of Plato, as opposed to he "unitarian" theory which makes the case that Plato was really consistent without. 

 Ramtekar is neither a developmentalist nor a unitarian. She sees it as a false dichotomy.

 Her reviewer, Smith, is clearly a developmentalist, and his review is a critique of Ramtekat for her failure to take that sensible position. One of his points is that Aristotle, who knew Plato and presumably had discussed these matters with him personally, takes a developmentalist view of his teacher's own psychology. 

 Ramtekat replies to that: "But unlike many of Plato’s ancient readers, historians of philosophy today care about the difference between 'Plato believed P' and 'Plato tried out P'; Aristotle, by contrast, is interested in the views found in Plato’s texts."

 That seems to be the gist of it. Ramtekat contends that most of what Plato wrote in the dialogs can only be understood within its dialogical context, and is something Plato is "trying out" but seldom something we should think of him as recommending for our own belief.  

And, she continues, does Aristotle consistently uphold a developmentalist view? 

 "As for the claim that according to Aristotle, the voice of Socrates in the early dialogues is that of the historical Socrates and in the later dialogues of Plato, this claim would need to be squared with the fact that in Politics , Aristotle suggests that the unnamed Athenian who is the main speaker of Plato’s last work, the Laws, is ‘Socrates’, and why the Phaedo, which is by objective measures early, lays out the metaphysical views that Aristotle attributes to Socrates rather than Plato." 
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