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Plato's philosophy consists of a series of sharply presented questions, and of bold, speculative, and incomplete answers to them. He admits the limitations of his knowledge, and before he has worked out his answers in any detail, he moves on to new questions. The Platonic dialogues do not constitute or contain a philosophical system, and in that way they differ from the works of such philosophers as Aristotle, the Stoics, Kant, and Hegel. It is not surprising that Plato has influenced thinkers and movements with different, even opposed, outlooks.

This was already true in later Greek philosophy, when both sceptics and dogmatists traced their origins to Plato. Plato's philosophical school, the Academy, under its heads from Speusippus to Polemon, developed the speculative metaphysics that might be derived from (among other sources) parts of the Republic and the Timaeus. But in the mid-third century Arcesilaus became head of the Academy, and made it a home of 'Academic' Scepticism; he developed the questioning, apparently negative tendencies of some of Plato's Socratic dialogues, and especially of the long and inconclusive discussion of knowledge in the Theaetetus. Arcesilaus claimed to preserve the Socratic aspects of Plato--the destructive crossexamination, deflation of pretensions to knowledge, and extreme caution about making claims to knowledge. It is easy to see how a rather selective reader of some Socratic dialogues might suppose that Plato presents conflicting appearances, exposing the flaws in arguments for each side, and encouraging the suspension of judgement.

A picture of Plato would be incomplete if it did not show how someone might find support in the dialogues for both scepticism and other-worldly dogmatism. Still, neither of these is a fair view of Plato; and the errors in both views result from misunderstanding of his Socratic method. The Socratic crossexamination is Plato's method for self-examination and the reform of common-sense beliefs, not for their wholesale abandonment. He denies that the rational conclusion to draw from Socratic examination is scepticism. Nor does he believe, as Plotinus believes under Plato's inspiration, that other-worldly mysticism is the only alternative to scepticism. Though many of Plato's conclusions are paradoxical, he argues both from and to the beliefs of Socrates' interlocutors. If we focus on the Socratic and dialectical character of Plato's arguments, we can see what is wrong or over-simplified in some apparently plausible objections to him.

To see what is most important about Plato, apart from his particular doctrines or the issues that he raises,-we have to make up our minds about the character of philosophy. We might claim (rather superficially) that the naturalists' achievement is their degree of success in developing scientific methods of research and inquiry. But Socrates and Plato consciously articulate philosophy as a discipline distinct from empirical science, and their degree of success in doing this is their major achievement.

Hostility to these claims of philosophy to be a distinct discipline results in Bentham (1748- 1832) verdict on Socrates and Plato:

While Xenophon was writing history, and Euclid giving instruction in geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretence of teaching morality and wisdom. This morality of theirs consisted in words. This wisdom of theirs, in so far as it had a meaning, consisted in denying the existence of matters made known to every body by experience [and] in asserting the existence of a variety of matters the non-existence of which was made known to every body by experience. Exactly in proportion as they and their notions thus differed from the general mass of mankind, exactly in that same proportion were they below the level of it.

If we see no point in the Socratic method, we see no point in Platonic philosophy, and we must agree with Bentham.

The naturalists' questions included some that were answerable by empirical inquiry, and some that were not. Plato clarifies the issue by distinguishing some of the philosophical questions from the more empirical questions, and by arguing that philosophical argument is neither purely empirical nor inevitably inconclusive.

To make progress in empirical inquiry, empirical scientists normally lay aside the basic questions about the nature of knowledge and reality. We may think they should do this because the questions are really unanswerable, or because our answers must rest on taste and sentiment, not on rational argument. We will be especially prone to these views if the result of our epistemological inquiries is nihilism or scepticism or Protagorean conventionalism. In each case there is no room for philosophy as a rational and constructive discipline.

Plato wants to show that the Socratic method of cross-examination is the basis of philosophy as a rational discipline. It would be foolish to use the Socratic method to settle questions in chemistry or carpentry. But when we ask basic questions, such as those discussed in the Republic, the accumulation of empirical information will not answer them for us. Plato argues that the Socratic method need not be arbitrary or hopelessly subjective; carefully practised, it is a source of justified claims to knowledge on fundamental questions. . .

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