Un enigma ricomposto? Personaggi, anonimato e coerenza dei dialoghi nel Platone di Catherine Zuckert e Leo Strauss

The limits of a systematic approach in the study of Plato are due not only to the difficulties arousing from the effort to reconstruct a chronology of composition of the dialogues but still more to the fact that in none of them does Plato speak, either directly nor through a spokesman. The realization of this evidence is shared nowadays by increasingly many scholars, who deeply differ in the way to solve the hermeneutical problems it engenders, as the present article seeks to show. In this context, the great book of C. H. Zuckert, Plato’s Philosophers. The Coherence of the Dialogues, displays a considerable effort to offer a coherent new reading of the dialogues. Her method, based on the conjunction of contextualization and overarching narrative, develops some fundamental insights of Leo Strauss and takes a remarkable position in contemporary Platonic research based on anonymity. Among the major novelties of her analysis lies the relevance attributed to Plato’s philosophers, that is, to all the characters who, besides Socrates, take charge of the conversation. If considered inside the overarching narrative of all the dialogues of the corpus platonicum, they exemplify and articulate different understandings of philosophy and let Socrates’ own position better emerge, as can be shown in the case of the Eleatic philosophers.