This short book includes much more "food for thought" than many tomes more than twice its' size. Alexandre Koyre demonstrates an incisive erudition in his commentary on four of Plato's greatest dialogues; these include the Meno, the Theatetus, the Protagoras, and the Republic. The Republic takes up about half of the short book presenting a focus on politics and on the just city.

Beginning with the lesson from the Meno that virtue is not taught, but it can be taught. The same subject is discussed in the Protagoras, yet in a different and, according to Koyre, more amusing way. The further discussions of Theatetus and Republic are equally inviting and challenging as far as they go. They suggest ways we may conceive of knowledge and elucidate how theory and action may work in combination in both philosophy and politics. Is there such a thing as a just city? This book provides direction toward how to think about this and other topics. Ultimately it is a good introduction to both the philosophy of Plato and the acute analytical thought of Alexandre Koyre. The result is both invigorating and engaging for the reader. ( )

Plato wrote dialogues, not treatises. This simple truth seems to elude many. Some people think that Plato was an enemy of poetry. Karl Popper (his head swimming with Bolsheviks and Nazis) wasted the entire first volume of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) imagining Plato as the proto-totalitarian. A computer repairman once insisted on telling me that The Allegory of the Cave was a 'self-indulgent fantasy.'

Would that everyone could read something like Discovering Plato (1947). There are other books that help readers to recognize the subtle philosophical meaning of the dialogue itself, the texture of Socratic irony and questioning, or the force of allusions to ancient poets and statesmen, but Koyré is particularly useful. He does not summarize or expand on the dialogues so much as direct the reader toward the implied mood of Plato’s works (in this instance, Meno, Protagoras, Theaetetus, and Republic), suggesting overtones and analogies that can resolve the apparent contradictions, paradoxes and inconclusiveness.

Koyré’s premise is that Plato was writing for a reader-auditor— someone basically familiar with the philosophical matters at hand, someone familiar with the nature of the dialogue form and the location, identity and experience of the characters, someone already in possession of an understanding derived from uncommon experience, a reader who can draw conclusions that the characters in the dialogues cannot. What is apparent to the reader-auditor frequently escapes Socrates’ interlocutors, who often do not even understand the questions asked of them, though they are rhetoriticians, generals, priests, mathematicians, etc. Plato has Theaetetus tell Socrates that science is true opinion; Socrates avoids a direct refutation, but the reader understands that opinion, true or false, is not science. Socrates’ subsequent discussion of opinion and our reading of it presupposes a method by which to distinguish true and false. The method is science.

Koyré’s short book deals only with two of Plato’s themes: the relationship of knowledge to virtue, and of politics to philosophy. The reader-auditor does not need to be convinced of the moral and theoretical supremacy of knowledge, and so recognizes without difficulty that the two themes overlap. The political problem of the constitution and government of the city is none other than the ethical problem of those who govern. How do we get a disinterested, responsible elite that can make philosophical understanding available as a guide to improving the imperfect cities of men? The political and moral reform of the city must begin with the reform of education and religion. Plato’s vigorous condemnation of traditional education and pieties disqualifies him as the impenitent reactionary imagined by Popper. His program of secondary and higher education had nothing in common with the Spartans’ training regimen. His critique of the traditional epic poets was not a dismissal of literature and art. (Plato’s writing is poetic; it is art.*) Against the gods as depicted by Hesiod and Homer, Socrates in The Republic advocated for the construction of new gods, as models of grandeur, courage, honor and virtue—qualities that could be taught as part of a course of study that aimed not at technical instruction but at intellectual and moral training.

Is it not reasonable, asks Koyré, to entrust power to those who know how to distinguish between good and evil, truth and error, reality and illusion? Has knowledge less right to exercise influence on the direction of affairs than courage, riches, oratorical talent, or birth and tradition? Koyré: “The paradox consists, not in Plato’s conception, but in the fact that it appears so strange to us.” For the philosopher, knowledge justifies power, and with knowledge comes a moral obligation to exercise it. One task of the philosopher-guardians is to translate the truth accessible only to pure thought into symbols and myths accessible to the imagination; that is likewise the role of art.* Our modern political reality—constructed from propaganda, truthiness, and fantasy-suasion—justifies Plato. Man is a credulous animal, writes Koyré, not a reasonable one.

Plato’s reader-auditor sees that the psychological structure of the individual and the social structure of the city fit neatly together. The ideal state, writes Koyré, is not a utopia but an atopia, since it exists only as an idea in the intelligible realm, where ideas have their ‘existence.’ It matters little whether our city can in fact ever come true. “We know that it is possible in the abstract, both to guide our action and to aid us in understanding and judging the imperfect cities in the midst of which fate has cast our lot, to form and to determine the ideal structure of Man.” ( )