Plato’s Philebus

Abstract

The Philebus is almost unanimously considered as one of Plato’s last dialogues, probably written around the same time as the Timaeus. Unlike other late dialogues, however, it takes the more conventional form of a conversation between Socrates and two interlocutors: Philebus and Protarchus. Philebus in fact refuses to discuss and remains silent for most of the dialogue, leaving to Protarchus the task of defending hedonism against the attacks of intellectualism championed by Socrates. The Philebus is a particularly rich and difficult work, which has often been viewed as messy. Although it has received the subtitle “On pleasure” since Antiquity, it contains, besides a lengthy examination of pleasure that notably argues for the possibility of false pleasures, a reflection on the relations between unity and plurality, an exposition of dialectic presented as a “god-given” and “heavenly” method, a fourfold classification of “all there is,” a cosmological argument purported to show that the world is governed by intelligence, and a hierarchical classification of the different kinds of knowledge. All these elements are integrated in a quest for “the good,” which at the beginning of the dialogue is identified to the best human life, but at the end seems to gain greater generality and concern not only human beings but also the whole or the universe. Are all these themes supposed to connect somehow, and if they are, in what manner? This question was already debated by the Neoplatonist commentators and was taken over by modern scholarship since the 19th century. Another question that has provoked scholars is the relation between the “metaphysics” exposed in the dialogue and Plato’s “unwritten doctrines” referred to by Aristotle. However, the greatest part of scholarship on the Philebus is currently devoted to scrutinize a theme or a portion of the text itself. After a relative neglect, this dialogue has indeed become the focus of much scholarly work during the last decades. The present bibliography had consequently to be highly selective and favors the most useful starting-points for further explorations of the wealthy literature devoted to this fascinating text.