In Plato’s dialogues Plato does not appear. The central character is nearly always someone called Socrates. So this means that Plato’s dialogues are just an account of the philosophy of Socrates and that Plato didn’t have any ideas of his own. Such a conclusion would be seem to be obviously true if you were reading the dialogues without knowing any of the background which everyone gets told when they start reading Plato’s dialogues.

This background information being that the Socrates in the dialogues, probably best referred to as the ‘Platonic Socrates’ (to distinguish him from the historical Socrates), is being used by Plato to espouse the philosophy of himself, Plato. So then the conclusion would seem to be the opposite of what I said above. In other words Plato’s dialogues are an account of the philosophy of Plato and Socrates didn’t have any ideas of his own.

But this is not true either. Because we do talk about “the philosophy of Socrates”. Where this is something separate from the philosophy of Plato. This philosophy of the historical Socrates is also often expounded by the Platonic Socrates. (In fact, Plato’s dialogues are pretty much the only source we have for the philosophy of the historical Socrates.) But the Platonic Socrates does not always espouse the philosophy of Plato. Just most of the time. This is confusing because then how do we know when the Platonic Socrates is saying what Plato thinks and when he is saying what the historical Socrates thinks?

I think the generally accepted view is that when the Platonic Socrates says things like that he “knows nothing” and that he just wants others to explain things to him. That this is the historical Socrates. And then when the Platonic Socrates expounds some substantive doctrine then he is saying what Plato thinks. But this means that we get situations where the Platonic Socrates is one minute saying he “knows nothing” and then a bit later he is giving a detailed explanation of his sophisticated (but, frankly, not very convincing) metaphysical theories about the universe. Like the theory of Forms or the Tripartite Soul.

Given all of this my question is: why? Why would Plato put all his philosophical views into the mouth of some other (recently deceased) actually existing person who already had his own views. Why didn’t he just have someone called ‘Plato’ in the dialogues explaining things to people? Or just create some fictional character?

It would be as if I was to write a book in which Stephen Hawking was explaining to people his theories of physics. But these theories weren’t what Stephen Hawking believed at all. They were just what I believed! If I did this people would say: this is an affront to the memory of Stephen Hawking. And they would be right!