Editing Plato (section)

=== Periodization ===
Plato's work falls roughly into four periods.<ref>This section relies almost entirely on Reza Negarestani's lectures on Plato, which are available here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNPzvth5F5U&list=PL2NulH_zOHESDHy3gkdmC-UHu6mWAjQsD&pp=iAQB</ref> In his '''early''' work, he tries to emulate Socrates. He employs the Socratic method of interrogation to undermine and annihilate contemporary dogma. Typical of this period is '''Euthyphro''', a short dialogue in which Piety is shown to be a tautology: ''are acts holy because they are loved by the gods, or are they loved by the gods because they are holy''? No satisfying answer here emerges - and this is typical of the early Plato - it is the same with '''Lysis''', a dialogue on friendship which ends with the admission that "we have not as yet been able to discover what we mean by a friend." 

In his '''middle''' period Plato attempts to go beyond Socrates, and begins to posit his own principle, the Good, as opposed to earlier work in which he remained almost entirely critical. This is the Plato of the '''Republic''', with its two-world ontology, the doctrine of forms, and the Good. Reza Negarestani has described the Good, or Form of Forms, as a "principle of intelligibility," in the sense that ''without it no predication or intelligence would be possible''. In a letter written toward the end of his life, he called this the most vulgar of his works. '''Theaetetus''' forms something of an '''intermediary''' phase, in which he begins to question the doctrine of forms as laid out in the Republic. 

'''Finally''', with the '''Philebus''', '''Timaeus''', the '''Sophist''' and the '''Laws''' we have the mature Plato. All the charm and playfulness is gone. In the last even Socrates himself disappears. Plato is toward the end of his life and has no time for detours down blind alleys of dialectic. He soberly critiques own doctrines, and steadily aims to complete his project of combining Eleatic being and Heraclitan flux in systematic theory of intellect. Already in the '''Philebus''' one can see that he has abandoned the earlier doctrine of forms, replacing them with something more akin to Categories in the Aristotelian or Kantian sense, no longer metaphysical objects but principles of intelligibility.  

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