The Midwife of Platonism: Text and Subtext in Plato's Theaetetus (review)

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: The Midwife of Platonism: Text and Subtext in Plato's Theaetetus Zina Giannopoulou David Sedley . The Midwife of Platonism: Text and Subtext in Plato's Theaetetus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Pp. x + 201. Cloth, $60.00. Scholarly interest in the Theaetetus, Plato's most systematic treatment of knowledge, has been recently on the rise. While comprehensive studies, such as Myles Burnyeat's The Theaetetus of Plato (Indianapolis, 1990) and Ronald Polansky's Philosophy and Knowledge: A Commentary on Plato's Theaetetus (Lewisburg, 1992), have valuably illuminated existing interpretative debates, they have also either neglected or treated marginally some of the dialogue's most thorny philosophical issues (such as, for example, the puzzling formal absence of the Forms from a dialogue placed after Plato's heady metaphysical exposition in Republic, the reappearance of the "early," aporetic dialectic, etc.). Sedley's book attempts to address these issues providing, along the way, a thoroughly stimulating and compelling interpretation of the dialogue. The overarching aim of his study is to offer a historical lens through which to read Theaetetus. Sedley argues that Socrates, the semi-historical figure portrayed in Plato's early dialogues, functions here as the midwife of Platonism: true to his philosophically negative mission in the "early" dialogues, he presses the right questions, forces his interlocutors to admit ignorance, but stops short of reaching a conclusive definition of knowledge. This dialectical approach, Sedley suggests, is as it should be, given Socrates' role as midwife in assisting others in the procreation of intellectual offspring, despite his inability to birth brainchildren of his own. But throughout the dialogue the reader glimpses the seeds of cardinal Platonic doctrines, sowed by the teacher Socrates in order to be harvested and reaped later by the pupil Plato. Theaetetus thus points out the continuity between the old, Socratic phase, which contains Socrates' historic contribution, and the new, Platonic phase, with its developed physical and metaphysical conceptual apparatus. Sedley candidly admits his intellectual debt to existing scholarly treatments of Theaetetus. From Cornford he obtains the notion that the dialogue's lack of metaphysical grounding must somehow be implicated in its aporetic ending. From Burnyeat he inherits the view that Theaetetus is a dialectical exercise that creates a double confrontation—one within the dialogue and the other between the dialogue and the reader—with the intention of encouraging an open-ended inquiry that defies any doctrinal commitment. The Anonymous's commentary on Theaetetus offers him the helpful suggestion that the practice of intellectual midwifery assists the birthing of ideas in the souls of others, but prevents the philosophic midwife's from procreating his own. Finally, in Long he finds the view that Theaetetus is Plato's reevaluation of Socrates. And yet, despite the indisputable contribution of all these interpretations, Sedley moves decidedly beyond them: he replaces their occasional tentativeness or partiality with a viable, holistic reading of the dialogue that responds confidently and intelligently to many of its interpretative puzzles. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, he does so by means of a theoretical model not extraneous or arbitrary, but rather engendered by the dialogue itself, that of the midwifery. This model accommodates even the Digression, a passage whose proper relation to the dialogue's main argument has often escaped scholarly attention. The ideal of pure intellectual endeavor or godlikeness, as is sketchily presented in the dialogue's excursus, is not evident in Socrates' life, because his own role as midwife precludes flights to another realm of things and binds him inextricably to the political and legal affairs of the city. It is rather a premonitory sign [End Page 353] of Plato's developed ethical understanding of the superior value of the contemplative life in Timaeus 89D2–90D7. Since physics and metaphysics are here posited as Plato's distinct philosophical contributions to a somewhat "unsophisticated" Socratic legacy, I would like briefly to point out two passages which, according to Sedley, bear evident marks of the transition from a Socratic to a Platonic phase. As far as physics is concerned, Socrates' somewhat crude physicalist account of visual perception in 156A2–157C3 is merely a harbinger of Plato's theory of particles as underlying elements of visual interaction in Timaeus...