NDPR Malcolm Schofield How Plato Writes: Perspectives and Problems

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.11.11 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Malcolm Schofield, How Plato Writes: Perspectives and Problems, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 320pp., $39.99 (hbk) 9781108483087.

Reviewed by Christopher Moore, Penn State University

In How Plato Writes, Malcolm Schofield collects fourteen “occasional offerings” on Plato published between 1997 and 2021. Binding together these works is a serious perceptiveness about the dialogues, a capacity to capture their most substantive but often not particularly evident argumentative moves. Speaking personally, I have found them to show Plato studies—sometimes a hermetic and self-satisfied field—in the best possible light, as instances of an acute and curious philosophical mind investigating the most interesting elements of an endlessly subtle, exploratory, and profound author. The title echoes Danielle Allen’s Why Plato Wrote (2010) and, further back, Paul Shorey’s What Plato...