 INTRODUCTION On the natural integrity of Plato's philosophy John Dewey once said, Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Plato was not a Platonist. I would like to show, in the following pages, that anyone who reads the dialogues of Plato, without bias or an axe to grind, will find a humorous, witty, pleasant friend, and not a desiccated scholarly Mandarin. Plato was an open-minded, tolerant, reasonable individual, not a tight-lipped, pietistic Puritan. In a word, Plato was an Athenian, not a Spartan. Scholars have made it virtually impossible to understand Plato over the years, with their careful distinctions, qualifications, and analytical considerations. They have made up a scholarly word, Platonism. Made us memorize it, and assumed everyone knew what it meant. But nothing could be more confusing and unclear. Thus, if Platonism means a world divided, separated, detached, between physical substance and mental substance, then Plato was not a Platonist. If Platonism means a perfect world of pure ideas, with no connection or relation to a world of perceptual things, then Plato was not a Platonist. If Platonism means a world of moral purity, unsullied by moral mistakes, errors, or the boiling cauldron of unsociable emotions, then again Plato was no Platonist. But scholars have insisted on each of these. The only thing I shall attempt to show in this entire book will be to indicate that such a pervasive misperception about Plato is quite mistaken, and rather misrepresents the entire thrust of Plato's thought. I shall also try to state what I think Plato actually was trying to say. I think full well that I may only cause more confusion rather than to come to a clear and distinct notion of Plato's real intentions. Nevertheless, al dhā ques fortuna yuvāt, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Alas, Plato in the modern day is almost universally taken to be a Platonist in each of the above senses—the priest, the politician, or Puritan—an easy target for those who would like to give Plato a bad name and hang him. Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. It began with his student, Aristotle, who used him for his own purposes. And Aristotle's interpretation has continued to this very day, most notably in its recency, in a book by I. F. Stone. Aristotle's aim in many of his writings is to attribute to Plato a realm of separated forms, the first charge, which forms would be infinitely regressive and meaningless on the one hand, or irrelevant to nature on the other. Without proceeding into the intricate details of Aristotle's caricature of his teacher, this much needs saying that the big mistake of the separated forms is usually said to be the third man argument. Now what is wrong with the third man argument? What is this obvious fallacy which is attributed to Plato? Even though Plato is careful to refute the argument himself many times, what is that argument? However, philosophers currently call it TMA, stated simply it is this. If Callius and Socrates are men that cannot be pure ideas, then there must needs be a third man, a pure idea, in order to understand the man-ness of Callius and the man-ness of Socrates. But if there is a third man, must there not also be a fourth man to understand the third and a fifth, a s- Sample complete. Ready to continue?