Abstract

According to Frank, Plato's dialogues offer divergent approaches to literacy: while one method is rigidly top-down, the other promotes learners' independence. She argues that Plato endorses the latter view and that this lens on becoming literate is also the one he favors for our acquisition of knowledge, as well as for ethics and politics. Dismissing the idea that Plato's thought developed, Frank moves without comment from the Republic to works usually deemed to belong to different phases of Plato's writing, both early and late. Because Frank's approach is nondoctrinal, in no dialogue is its main character properly seen as Plato's "mouthpiece"....