Not already in existence
The intricacies of the second "A Qian" since it was recognized as fake
Text/Beam Neutralization
The ancients did not doubt that this work was not because they had full trust in all the works of Plato, such as Eryxias and Axiochus, which had always been considered Plato's "bastards", different from other "outgoing" dialogues; nor because they were completely vague about which platoic dialogues belonged, such as Panactius, who had pointed out that Feddo was a forgery. Aristoxenus argues that Plato's Monarchy is a massive plagiarism of Protagoras's work; nor is it because of the neglect of the text that it does not question its authority. It has been widely read and cited as Plato's work for more than a thousand years, and as a gateway into Plato's philosophy.
But in modern times, Schleiermacher is the first to question the authority of the Pre-Athar as Plato's work, and before we get into the specific discussion, let's listen to Hegel's disdain for Schleiermacher's chewing words:
To study Plato from a philological point of view, as in the commentary by Mr. Schleiermacher, to make a critical examination of this or another secondary dialogue to see whether it is true or false (according to the evidence of the ancients, the vast majority is beyond doubt). This is also superfluous to philosophy, and it is also the overly trivial and critical critique of our time.
Unfortunately, this trivial and critical approach is still quite influential in academic circles today, as can be seen by the fact that scholars do not attach importance to translating and quoting Plato's doubtful works.
However, Schleiermacher's work is not completely meaningless and philosophical, and his treatment of this dialogue also makes him a representative of the path of historical or written evidence. Influenced by Romanticism, he had a special feeling for the individuality of phenomena, and the discovery of the individual was indeed a great achievement of Romantic culture, but the famous aphorism that the individual is "to be avoided (unspeakable)" and the idea that it was impossible to grasp the individual's individuality and conceptual grasp also emerged in the Romantic period. In Schleiermacher, a very flexible and dialectical and peculiar way of thinking was found, giving a deep impression of classical humanism. He illuminated the path of pre-Socratic studies and directly inspired the study of the Berlin school of history, represented by Eduard Zeller.
Schleiermacher blamed his predecessors, without doubt, accepted the excessive evaluation of this dialogue since ancient times, he believes that those who have given this dialogue a noble status from ancient times to the present, can not invent anything original at all, but blindly follow the tradition, of course, including Hegel, but he did not notice that Hegel did not care at all about which dialogue, he first acknowledged all platoic works and then considered it as a whole, this is the practice of ancient times, and the ancient commentary is not only to study its contents, Schleiermacher himself has opened up a way of studying individual dialogues, which is most interesting to historians, that is, to question and explain the reasons for each specific investigation, some of them. Later, it developed into dividing the chronology of works, dividing the dialogue into three periods of early, middle and late, and then looking for the trajectory of plato's philosophical development in it, which is still a popular practice in Chinese academic circles, and has changed greatly abroad since the 1970s.
Schleiermacher's main criticisms of this dialogue are as follows:
It was once a subject most particularly appreciated by those who routinely praised this little book in general, but to us it is so tedious and irrelevant that we cannot blame Plato, and anyone who can confirm its spirit will see this in this dialogue.
He thinks that this dialogue lacks consistency in writing and Socratic characterization, he does not quote the platonic words in the text, but quotes some "worthless" fragments, which read like a mutilated dialogue, about platonic texts, he thinks that it is only imitating other outstanding Plato works, and the effect is ordinary, he thinks that socrates in this part is more like Xenophon's than Plato's, for example, there is a large paragraph praising Sparta and Persia. This passage is the most important point of entanglement in the dispute between truth and falsity.
Finally he deduced that the present passage was a later student, and that he had received a plan of dialogue writing abandoned by Plato, who was ready to divide the subjects of the passage among the other parts for discussion, and the student himself added some content, thus appearing inconsistent throughout the dialogue.
Schleiermacher's assessment had a great impact and caused the article to fall out of favor immediately, but there was no consensus at the time. George Grote, a famous British historian of Greek history, considers this and The Latter alcabiades to be excellent Socratic dialogues in both theme and style, but reluctantly acknowledges that the latter is of secondary importance. He argues that the "inconsistencies" criticized by Schleiermacher are the result of the complexity and extraordinary character of Plato's dialogue itself in the characters and the course of the conversation.
Later scholars, mostly influenced by Schleiermacher, paid little attention to this dialogue. Paul Shorey, for example, generally agrees with Schleiermacher's assessment, but he notes the Aqian in its entirety, pointing out that the reason why this dialogue is not like Plato's is that it is too pedantic and too carefully arranged, and he also believes that there are two novelties in this Plato dialogue, one is to clearly point out that the body is the means of the soul, and the other is to put forward for the first time that because the eyes only see themselves in the reflection, the soul must reflect on itself in other souls. Whether it is plato's own work is also questionable.
From the middle of the nineteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, the predominantly speculative or reserved speculation that this work was platonic was an early work by Plato, of which we are familiar with Taylor's seemingly eclectic assessment, saying:
It is the most important of this (pseudo-writings) in terms of scope and value, as it contains an excellent comprehensive summary of socrates-Plato's measure of goodness and the 'care' of the soul... There is nothing in the book that actually does not deserve Plato.
He considered it to be, as the previous generation had claimed, an excellent introduction to Plato's ethics and political philosophy, but it was precisely because of its nature that it became suspicious, because it was too well organized, too much like a textbook than a dialogue plato was willing to write.
This contempt of the Apocrypha by classical scholars had the unfortunate effect that people did feel the need to discuss its authority, yet the evidence they presented often did not adequately support their doubts. For example, some people say that this passage uses the rare and literary words κρὴγυος and ἄχραντος, so as to prove that this is not Plato's work, we should not deny that Plato can use these expressions to achieve the desired effect, because philosophers before Aristotle rarely expressed their views directly in the first person in their works (even in Aristotle,00 they cannot think that what Aristotle wrote was entirely his personal opinion), in dialogue creation. There are many kinds of expressions to fit the scene, and we can't deny a dialogue because of one or two new words; and there is a view like Taylor's, which is too platonic, but why don't we think that only the real work is the most like the real work? Thus the person who rejects this part directly by a hypothesis often sees that this part is very similar to and different from other dialogues, just like each dialogue, he only bets that it is a forgery, but does not find that this gambling game is not worth doing at all.
In modern times, there have been two ways to distinguish between true and false works that seem more scientific: Stylometry and Chronology. The latter is to determine the age of the work through textual analysis, and the former is mainly to determine the author of the work through the analysis of terminology. G.R. Ledger, who used a computer to measure the style of Plato's writings, yielded astonishing results, saying that if we regarded the Former Apocrypha as a forgery, the author of that dialogue was extremely gifted in the writing of Plato-style works, and that this dialogue was more compatible with other dialogues that were considered true than those that were real. But we really can't fully trust this analysis, because the data is easy to summarize, but how to determine what style is Plato's, we can't be sure intuitively, and we always need to try different models. And chronology has also been discussed a lot recently, mainly with the original generation method under the guidance of Plato's works in stages, it indicates Plato's three sets of dialogues through analysis, in the use of some small words reflect different styles, if used in this analysis, this part can not be classified into any group, because it mixes the typical characteristics of the three groups, if this chronological investigation is correct, then this part can indeed be called false, But the question is whether this chronological approach to analysis is correct. Because we know that this method of analysis was established at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the last century, when this article was no longer included in the overall analysis, and those recognized articles constituted the content of the analysis, and the results made therefrom were more applicable to those articles, and this division of the three groups of early, middle, and late was originally rough and improper, and some articles had several different styles, such as "Drinking", and we could not distinguish between the specific discussion of the content and only the text to distinguish the true from the false.
According to Pradeau's statistics, the following table shows the main scholars and their views on the authenticity debate about this passage from Schleiermacher to the end of the last century:
As can be seen from the above table, in fact, there has been no unified opinion on the authenticity of this part in the academic circles, especially in the past thirty years, which has almost given people a tendency to completely deny the necessary discussion of the authenticity of this part on the premise of acknowledging that it is Plato's work.
In the 1920s, Paul Friedländer had forcefully refuted the views since Schleiermacher, arguing that the "inconsistencies" questioned by his predecessors were typical expressions of the dramatic irony of dialogue, and the choice of Socrates and Alcabiyad as dialogue figures increased the dramatic tension of dialogue. At the same time, he first emphasized the educational significance of this article, which affected the attention of future generations to this part. He also cites Plutarch's quotations to the text, Aristotle's response to seeing himself in the eyes of it in the other eyes, and Xenophon's imitation of the dialogue between Socrates and Groucon in Book III of The Chronicles of Socrates as proof of its authenticity. In the discussion of the content of the dialogue, he was the opposite of Schleiermacher, arguing that the large passage discussing Sparta and Persia was not only not superfluous, but rather the core of the whole text, and the main reason why Socrates was able to persuade Alcabiyad. His comment was significant, changing attitudes towards the article and inspiring people to start paying attention to it again.
Recently, Steven Forde has taken a step further at the perspective of women to explain what Friedland considers to be at the heart of the whole text, a large discussion of Sparta and Persia to pinpoint the role of women in education. Also in response to this passage, Mark Lutz understands Socrates' dialogue from the perspective of cultural relativism and democracy, its prominent position in education as a whole, and its enlightenment to modern times.
The most comprehensive discussion of the authenticity of this passage is the recent Prado-edited Alqubiade with an introduction and brief commentary, and the detailed notes of Nicholas Denyer, which in many ways strongly prove that this part is plato's own work, or that it is insufficient evidence to be forgery.
In fact, since Friedland, people have paid less and less attention to the question of the authenticity of this article, because everyone is no longer like the schleiermacher and the Berlin School of History under the influence of the academic circles a hundred years ago, with a strict distinction between the works to which the individual belongs to the view of the philosopher, such as the so-called "Socrates problem" has now shifted from the discussion of materials to the discussion of philosophy, which is Plato's real works, is no longer so important, the value of works is separated from the "historical archives" the shackles are reconsidered, and of course the value of this passage to us will not be affected in the slightest by the discernment of truth and falsity that arises under the premise of a certain philosophical conception.
As we calm down from these seemingly external arguments, let's take a look at the questions without prejudice: Who is Alcabiyad, the protagonist of this story? What is his relationship with Socrates? What about this article? What meaningful arguments can we see from this?
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