Review of Plato and intellectual development A new theoretical framework emphasising the higher-order pedagogy of the Platonic Dialogues

Why review a book on Plato in a journal dedicated to language and literacy education? Some answers come to hand: Almost all we know of Plato is due to his written products, so his contributions, and in a sense even his identity, are arch-literate constructions. It is also certain that Plato's teacher, Socrates, not only refused to read or write, but was also, at best, semi-literate. Plato's decision to render his teacher's dialogues into writing was based on the premise that these highly contextualised, dynamic exchanges could be reworked into texts--the hope being, accurately as it turned out, that these 'readings of talk' might prove instructive across time and place. Socrates had become a demi-god for many Athenians; how much of the records of the Socratic Dialogues was Plato's remodelling of the words of this demi-god into his own intellectual and moral likeness is impossible to determine, simply because there are no other documents to tell us.