Plato's Literary Garden

This work is designed for students who are undertaking the serious study of Plato for the first time. It aims to provide a method for engaging with the dialogues as actively as the actual participants are engaged, and discusses the significance of the dramatic and literary form of the dialogues.

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Plato's dialogues are universally acknowledged as standing among the masterworks of the Western philosophic tradition. What most readers do not know, however, is that Plato also authored a public letter in which he unequivocally denies ever having written a work of philosophy. If Plato did not view his written dialogues as works of philosophy, how did he conceive them, and how should readers view them? In Plato's Literary Garden, Kenneth M. Sayre brings over thirty years of Platonic scholarship to bear on these questions, arguing that Plato did not intend the dialogues to serve as repositories of philosophic doctrine, but instead composed them as teaching instruments.