Abstract

Scholars often assume that Plato could have accomplished his purposes by employing an essay format, and that most of the views presented and defended by the philosophic masters in the dialogues are views he held when he composed those dialogues. Chapter 1 of this dissertation raises problems with these assumptions and discusses how Kenneth Sayre, Mitchell Miller, and Stanley Rosen assess the significance of Plato's dialogue form in the face of such problems. ;After providing a brief sketch of medical and psychiatric ideas current in Plato's day and pointing out a large number of passages from the dialogues in which Plato employs these ideas, Chapter 2 propounds and makes a preliminary case for three interrelated theses. First, it maintains that many of the dialogues depict Socrates and the other masters as attempting to engender or restore health in the polis of Athens and in the souls of individuals who had influence on the life of the polis. Second, it holds that many of the dialogues are depictions of conversations between philosophers and nonphilosophers which are importantly like interactions between physicians and patients in Greek medical practice, and that the dialogues function as quasi-psychiatric case histories presented by Plato to his readers. Third, it maintains that in a typical dialogue Plato depicts a philosopher first as diagnosing what is wrong with certain attitudes or opinions held by his interlocuters and then as attempting to do therapy on the interlocuters. ;Chapters 3 and 4 attempt to confirm these theses by showing that they cast a great deal of light on the literary structures of the middle-period Symposium and the late-period Philebus. The final chapter notes that a psychiatric view of the significance of the dialogue form suggests the possibility of a new understanding of the relationship between the Philebus and the Phaedo