Perspectivism and Conciliation in the Reading of Plato’s Dialogues

Abstract

In recent decades, a growing number of scholars have questioned the developmental approach to Plato that dominated scholarship during the 20th century. In this context, old strategies of reading the dialogues have been renewed and new approaches proposed. Basically, three different reading strategies the dialogues have been advocated: the still dominant Developmentalism, Unitarianism, and the Literary (or Dramatic) reading. These different approaches are still largely taken as competitors and there seems to be no methodology available that systematically integrates these different readings. In this paper, I work upon the “Perspective reading” proposed by Kahn (2005), and Gonzales (2016) in order to present a methodology that integrates some aspects of these different approaches in a systematic and coherent way. -- Original in English.