Plato's Designed Narratives: Contemporary Platonic Scholarship.

Plato is one of the greatest philosophers in the western philosophical tradition and he is the first one whose complete works are still available to us. We have very little data on his life and literary activity. As a result, many conflicting theories have been developed by scholars of various times regarding the interpretation of Plato's dialogues and their chronology to the extent it bears on that interpretation. This paper delves into one aspect of Platonic scholarship that studies the literariness in Plato's dialogues, taking illustrations from two of his works. It argues how Platonic scholarship is slowly paying attention to his rhetoric and poetry while studying his comments on the same. This paper aims at studying the platonic writings of Socrates' speeches from the current critical perspective of western scholars and presents sample dialogues. Stephen Halliwell, Annie Mary Bowery, Griswold and Kauffman are some of the leading Plato scholars who view these philosophic writings as dramatic dialogues that are descriptive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]