The Making of the Platonic Corpus

This volume aims to discover, behind the static and systematic variety of the Platonic corpus, a living whole in its dynamic and complex development. It does so by focusing on two major sets of questions. The first concerns the individual components of the corpus, the institutional and the philosophical context of their emergence, and the questions of authorship and revision. The second question has to do with the corpus as a whole, i.e. with the progressive organization of the dialogues into a recognized body of work, including both ancient and modern editions and classifications, as well as the formation and transformations of the canon. We show that both separate texts and the corpus as a whole were subject to creative transformations within and beyond the Academy. Plato himself provided an example, being first to revise his own texts and to discover that the unchanging written word is an imperfect medium for the ever-unfolding philosophical discourse.