Philosophos Plato's Missing Dialogue

Plato famously promised a final dialogue in the Sophist-Statesman, a series aiming to define three sorts of experts--the sophist, the statesman, and the philosopher--but the final dialogue on the philosopher is missing. In Philosophos: Plato's Missing Dialogue, Mary Louise Gill argues that Plato promised the Philosopher but did not write it to stimulate his audience and encourage them to work out, for themselves, the portrait it wouldhave contained. Gill reveals how, in finding the philosopher through the exercises Plato sets in the work, the student of Plato becomes a philosopher by mastering his methods. She shows that the target of Plato's exercise is internally related to its pedagogical purpose.

Mary Louise Gill is Professor of Philosophy and Classics at Brown University. She is the author of Aristotle on Substance: The Paradox of Unity (Princeton, 1989) and of many articles and several co-edited books on Plato and Aristotle.