Plato, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The early dialogues preserve more of the historical Socrates — the elenchic-aporetic method, the disavowal of wisdom ("I know that I know nothing"), the ethical focus on virtue and the good life, the refusal to write doctrines.1 The middle dialogues develop my own distinctive metaphysics — the Theory of Forms, the immortal soul, the philosopher-rulers — through Socrates's mouth as my own thinking matures.2
The late dialogues sometimes shift to other principal speakers (the Eleatic Stranger of Sophist and Statesman, the Athenian Stranger of the Laws, Timaeus of the Timaeus, Parmenides of the Parmenides) — a formal acknowledgment that what is being said is no longer the Socratic Socrates speaking. I myself never speak in my own voice in any of the dialogues; the question of "what Plato thinks" is always mediated through the dialogue form, which I chose for principled philosophical reasons.3
All this is necessary, Socrates says, finally to answer the basic question about justice— not tohat it is, but why it must make the just person live a good, happy life, and the unjust person a bad, miserable one. Speaking throughout to no identified person—that is, directly to the reader—Socrates relates a conversation he took part in one day in the Athenian port city of Piraeus.Complete Works, pp. 118–119
Pythagoreans were noted for their belief in the immortality of the soul and its reincarnation in human or animal form and for the consequent concern to keep one's soul pure by avoiding contamination with the body, so as to win the best possible next life. Socrates weaves all these themes into his own discussion of the immortality of the soul.Complete Works, pp. 66–67
It is this: Did they consider all these one, or two, or, as there are three names, did they divide them into three classes and ascribe to each a class, corresponding to a single name? THEo. Î think he has no objection to talking about them. What do you say, stranger? srR. Just what you did, Theodorus; for I have no " objection, and it is not difficult to say that they 1 Of. Od. xvii. 485-7. considered them three.Sophist, pp. 3–4
The standard Anglophone position is Vlastos's Socratic- Platonic division. The Strauss school reads the literary structure as the locus of philosophical meaning, refusing the historical-Socratic project. Brickhouse-Smith defend greater unity across the dialogues. The textual evidence supports the developmental reading; the strong unity claim and the strong Strauss esotericism both face textual difficulties.