The Order of the Later Dialogues of Plato

IN 1953, Mr. G. E. L. Owen1 published in the Classical Quarterly an article purporting to prove that the Timaeus ought, on various grounds, to be dated before the Theaetetus and the Parmenides and to approximately the same period of Plato's life as the Phaedrus. His most powerful motive for making this change was a desire to rid the later dialogues of the shadow of the Paradigms and to avoid the difficulties involved in the attempt to reconcile the metaphysics of the Timaeus with the more sophisticated system of the Philebus. Since the publication of this article, Owen's view has met with a fair degree of recognition, and criticism of it has been limited. Certain of its supposed proofs have, however, now been disposed of by Cherniss,2 but Cherniss' refutation has left a few questions incompletely answered and has allowed several others to pass unchallenged. Most important of all, it has not attempted to explain why it is that from time to time scholars find the Timacus an obstacle to their theories of the progress and development of Plato's thought. If such radical reforms as that suggested by Owen are to be rejected, we must find some account of the later dialogues, that is those from the Theaetetus and the Parmenides onward (including the Timaeus), which can easily be proved from the dialogues themselves and from our knowledge of the thought of Plato's own lifetime. If we succeed in this, we shall avoid the necessity to introduce views of Plato as a critical thinker, for although perhaps such views alone make him palatable to later generations of philosophers, they seem to be contradicted by his own works

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