Meilaender, Peter C. Review of Christopher Rowe's PLATO AND THE ART OF PHILOSOPHICAL WRITING. BMCR (December 2008).

Rowe, Christopher. Plato and the Art of Philosophical Writing. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. Plato is the great philosophical flirt. He is the philosophical critic of poetry and the most poetic of philosophers, the defender of justice whose apparent model of the good man shuns political participation, the critic of writing who writes--never, however, in his own voice, but typically through that of a man known for his irony. Plato is always tempting the reader with apparent morsels of knowledge, then skittering gingerly away from quite endorsing them, all the while compelling the reader somehow to hunt for Plato's own views through the thickets of the philosophical conversations he reports. The question of what Plato wishes to teach us cannot be answered apart from the question of how we ought to read him in the first place. Christopher Rowe's new book is a challenging, insightful, and provocative discussion of this relationship between what Plato believed and the literary form in which he chose to present it. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.bmcreview.org/2008/12/20081222.html.