Alex Priou’s book makes valuable contributions to two important conversations: one about the remarkably missing although promised Platonic dialogue Philosopher, and another about the potential Socratic response to modern scientism.

The second of these is the inspiration for the title of the book and the project as a whole. Priou describes two modern charges that have been leveled against the Platonic Socrates—that he is, first, unscientific in his method, and second, unscientific in his subject matter (3–4). According to these charges, Socrates begins from ordinary opinion and relies too heavily on the evidence of the senses, coupled with an “inductive reasoning that is at best sloppy and at worst sophistic” (4). Moreover, Socrates seems to be unduly concerned with the good, just, or the beautiful and such notions are “not subject to scientific demonstration” (4). Priou claims that these modern accusers avoid such unfruitful inquiries and instead opt for thinking about human beings as machines. As Priou points out, exemplars of this reductionist thinking include the works of Bacon and Descartes.

The question emerges: Where can we see in the Platonic corpus a Socratic response to such charges? Priou turns to the trilogy Theaetetus/Sophist/Statesman and proposes an innovative and insightful reading of the dialogues. In doing so, he attempts to answer the charges while also make sense of the argument and action of the trilogy and the omission of the fourth dialogue, Philosopher.

Priou suggests that the trilogy seems to condemn Socrates for his inability to define knowledge. But he responds that the texts invite such a reading only at first, as an identification with the mathematically minded Theodorus and Theaetetus. Such a reading leads naturally to the ensuing discussions in the Sophist/Statesman. But it is here that Priou, following the work of Cropsey, suggests a different approach. On completing the Statesman, the reader must return to the Theaetetus as a response to the later dialogues. Priou admits that such a procedure may sounds strange but points out that Plato presents the conversation between Socrates and Theaetetus through the later recording of Euclides. The composition of the text, dramatically, is then actually after the two later dialogues. There is not only Socrates the character in the conversation with Theaetetus but also Socrates the composer or author of the conversation as he narrates it to Euclides. The existence of the latter Socrates, coupled with the important question “how does Socrates stand in relation to his written self?” (15) invites readers to reread the Theaetetus with new eyes, and thus see the Theaetetus itself as replacing the missing dialogue, Philosopher. The dialogue, on this second reading, shows that Socrates is “the philosopher par excellence” (14).

The structure of the book thus follows this reading order. Priou begins with a chapter on Theaetetus, “with all the flat-footedness of Theodorus, without a touch of irony or humor” (17) and then turns to chapters on the Sophist and Statesman “as the Stranger’s elaboration of the grounds of Theodorus’ discontent” (15). Finally, the book’s closing chapter returns to the Theaetetus “with Socrates’ ironic eye, looking to see how Socrates’ record of his actual conduct absolves him both of Theodorus’ accusation and the Stranger’s more substantive critique” (17). Reading the dialogues this way, Priou suggests, reveals that the four dialogues—Theaetetus/Sophist/Statesman/“Theaetetus”—are three tragedies followed by a satyr play.

In the chapter on the Statesman, Priou claims that this dialogue is actually the proper starting point for thinking about all three. This is because the ending of the Sophist yields the insight that the sophist “is parasitic not primarily on the philosopher but on the statesman” (93). The Stranger “reorients the conversation” (94) by replacing Theaetetus (and his lack of zeal) with a more courageous young Socrates (no relation), setting a goal for the two of them to discover what Priou calls an “epistemic heterogeneity,” that is, “the distinct look (idea) of [the Statesman’s] science” (94). It is the uniqueness of statesmanship that the Stranger is after, and it is precisely this uniqueness that young Socrates, in his zeal, fails to understand (96). Young Socrates is “an imperialist mathematician, willing to develop a wholly scientific conception of statecraft through a quasi-Cartesian extension of the model of mathematics” (98). It is not heterogeneity but epistemic homogeneity that young Socrates seeks. Priou argues that Plato links this imperialist desire for epistemic homogeneity to a kind of pride. It is an ambitious yearning to bend the order of the world, in its recalcitrant opacity, to one’s own conceptual schemata. The desire for wisdom here is dangerously polluted by the will to power. It is precisely this yearning that the stranger hopes to correct in young Socrates in his myth of cosmic experience (106), discussion of the nature of models (111), and in showing him that the inadequacy of the very model they are using to describe statesmanship—weaving—actually reveals statesmanship’s uniqueness (114–15). Priou argues that “nothing less hangs in the balance in their application of the model of weaving to statecraft, than the whole purpose of the trilogy: Plato’s defense of Socrates, of the problem of Socrates, before the tribunal of science” (119).

Priou expands upon this, in suggesting that statesmanship is unlike weaving in that the diacritical component of statesmanship is essential to its nature for its own sake, not merely as a means to achieve the syncretical component: “the properly scientific part of statecraft is not the act of legislation … but rather begins from or is wholly constituted by the diacritical examination of the scientific deficiency of the law … Because the syncritical component is necessarily flawed, it is subordinate to the diacritical component, that is, the exposure of the scientific inadequacy of the laws” (124). There is an unscientific, imprecise unraveling that is part of the very goal of statesmanship. This conversation does not reveal what this diacritical unraveling is, but Priou suggests that it “has a deep kinship with Socratic political philosophy” (125). Like Socrates, the statesman turns out to be an in-between. He is caught between the tyrant and the many, who each imitate one side of statesmanship—the syncritical and the diacritical. But the statesman proper must instead weave together different natures, the moderate and courageous ones: “What the statesman must do, therefore, is exile the hubristic and enslave the lowly, so that only the best of each of the two contrary natures remain, namely, those receptive to the education the statesman prescribes” (129–30). But the essential diacritical function is even here left out, a fact that young Socrates does not notice at the end of the dialogue. For the reader, it is clear that the account of the statesman in the Statesman is incomplete and that we are prompted to look elsewhere for the missing element.

In the dramatic order of the dialogues, we are expecting a conversation about the philosopher to follow the ending of the Statesman. But no such dialogue exists. Instead, Plato offers us the Apology, and several scholars have taken this text to be a suitable replacement for the missing Philosopher. In the final chapter, Priou argues that the Apology is not the missing text because it does not present the philosopher as he is but offers a poetic distortion that is attractive to the city (138–39). While the deed of the Apology is a singular achievement of Socrates’ whole life, “when it comes to speeches … the Platonic Socrates took no pains to have any recorded save that found in the Theaetetus” (139). Priou suggests that the attention to Socratic midwifery offers us a new glimpse into the function of the dialogue when we reread it. Socratic midwifery also reveals, on a second reading made possible only after one completes the Statesman, the missing diacritical element of statesmanship, thus showing the philosopher’s response before the tribunal of science. The philosopher alone, unlike the sophist and the statesman, appears to use refutation for the sake of education. Although Priou does not suggest it, I wonder if he would agree that sophistry seems to be a kind of refutation lacking any educative aim, while statesmanship appears to aim at a kind of education lacking (dangerously) the activity of refutation. The philosopher is thus unique in pursuing a different activity, both refutative and educative, that provokes wonder about the problems and elusiveness of the whole (see 167 and 172–74). It is finally the opacity of the good that grounds Socratic knowledge of ignorance, and it underlies the Socratic response to a modern narrowing of our view of human nature. The elder Socrates thus combines the courage of his young namesake with the moderation of Theaetetus, in his wonder before the transcendent problem of knowing the whole. Is such wonder still possible in the face of modern scientism? Priou’s book offers a compelling and provocative defense of it and invites serious readers of Plato to think with him about Socrates’ own reflections about his activity, and how it can stand up to Theodoran (or modern scientific) accusations of imprecision.