Book review: Robert F. Ladenson, Moral Issues in Special Education: An Inquiry into the Basic Rights, Responsibilities and Ideals

Abstract

interlocutors’ characters – their concerns, their experiences and their acts before or after the dramatic date of the dialogues in which they appear – colours every Socratic conversation. Jones and Nakazawa are primarily interested in addressing the scholarship that ignored Plato’s characterization and drama and focused instead on dividing his corpus into periods of his alleged intellectual development. Although they note that identifying dialogues as ‘early’, ‘middle’ and ‘late’ has increasingly lost defenders, that developmental framework grounds their analysis; they discuss separately, for example, intellectualism in the early dialogues and intellectualism in the middle dialogues. In my view, Jones and Nakazawa would have offered an even richer view of the psychological nuance in Plato’s theory of moral education had they drawn more heavily on scholars who have looked at the interplay between drama and philosophy in the dialogues. Nevertheless, this is perhaps an unfair critique. Given the array of scholarly approaches to Plato, there are many interpretive frameworks available to Plato scholars, and Jones and Nakazawa have certainly embraced one that has long had a great deal of influence. Had they drawn more on scholarship about Plato’s use of character and drama, their conclusion would be the same and no less original and important: Habituation and epiphany are central to the Platonic theory of moral education.