In Plato's second epistle appears the following line:
For this reason I myself have never yet written anything on these subjects, and no treatise by Plato exists or will exist, but those which now bear his name belong to a Socrates become fair and young.
What is meant by this? Is he trying to say that his corpus of work should be attributed to Socrates and not him?
How do you interpret this line?
Plato (like Socrates, as depicted in the Phaedrus) thought that philosophy should be an oral practice. Philosophy in dialog is a living thing: sensitive to context and nuance, and giving the philosopher the opportunity to correct misunderstandings and explain subtleties. Philosophy in writing is dead bones, which later readers then try putting flesh and life to, like intellectual paleontologists. In that spirit, Plato is saying that he does not (and never will) write philosophy. Instead, he is merely recounting the dialogs his own teacher had, trying to keep that oral spirit from fading away.
The myth of Plato, author of Socratic dialogues is tenacious and there are various reasons for it. Among them chiefly the propaganda of various moralists who did no like his turning in old age to purely epistemic and even naturalistic problems. No matter how disputable, the chronology of his texts shows just this and Charles H. Khan published in 2013 his Plato and the Post-socratic Dialogue.The Return to the Philosophy of Nature (CambridgeUP) and there stated in the preface:
The interpreter of Plato’s later work faces an entirely different task. To begin with, there are striking changes in literary form. We must take account of the replacement of Socrates as principal speaker, first by Parmenides, then by a visitor from Elea, and finally by the statesman scientist Timaeus from another western Greek city. (In the Laws Plato himself will make a masked appearance in the person of an anonymous Stranger from Athens.) Even the Socrates who does return as chief speaker in the Theaetetus and Philebus is a less dramatic figure..
No serious reader will consider the Timaeus to be really 'a dialogue' and some other late works (Philebus, Repblic) are just as easily rewritten as treatises (by omitting all the yes-es and no-s attributed to decorative interlocutors). So Kahn continues
What we have in these late dialogues is a new Platonic philosophy that can be seen as deliberately post-Socratic – an investigation in which Plato systematically returns to problems that were of primary concern for Socrates’ predecessors: the nature of knowledge and the nature of the physical world. The symbol for this return is the replacement of Socrates by Parmenides as chief speaker, and by his sequel, the Stranger from Elea. Plato’s return, then, is to a philosophical tradition that is independent of Socrates and directed towards the physical sciences, but founded now on the metaphysics of unchanging Being introduced byParmenides. Thus, the project of these later dialogues is to reclaim the study of nature within the framework of a Platonic-Eleatic philosophy of intelligible Form.
To sum it up: against the hundred quotes how the young Socrates was disappointed by Anaxagoras' use of Nous it is difficult to find somebody commenting that later he regressed to a rather secondary role.
