Plato’s Dialogues

Plato’s Dialogues belong to a genre of literary prose known as Socratic Dialogues that developed in Greece at the turn of the fourth century BC. The best-known examples are the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon’s Socratic works.

There are 25 known dialogues attributed to Plato^(a) including the source of the Atlantis story – Timaeus and Critias.

I have read that “it’s true that in Plato’s dialogues he never speaks explicitly on behalf of himself. Still, there has been a wide consensus to interpret the dialogues such that the always-present character Socrates represents either the original Socrates (in the ‘early’ dialogues) or Plato (in the ‘middle’ and ‘late’ dialogues).”>Plato prefers to communicate indirectly with his audience using the interlocutors in the dialogues to do it for him.<

It is beyond my competence to discuss such niceties and will happily leave it to others. However, it seems to me that our knowledge of Plato’s philosophy is derived primarily from the dialogues, even though he did not write them in the first person.>Incidentally, Plato was rather critical of the value of writing as he considered verbal communication superior to the written word, an echo of the strongly held opinion of his mentor, Socrates, who wrote nothing.<

^(a) Dialogues of Plato (archive.org)