March 2009 Volume 4, number 1 http://nome.unak.is http://hdl.handle.net/1946/5979 90 Kenneth Dorter, The Transformation of Plato's Republic (Lexington Books, 2006),395 pp by Geir Þórarinsson It should not come as a surprise to anyone that scholarly interest in Platos Republic is as strong as it has ever been. This important dialogue continues to receive much attention. Kenneth Dorters The Transformation of Platos Republic [henceforth TPR] makes a valuable contribution to the scholarly discourse on this central Platonic dialogue. Dorter offers an ambitious interpretation of the entire dialogue based on what he takes to be the dialogues underlying organizational principle. The result is a powerful and enticing reading of the dialogue as a unified and coherent whole. TPR is divided into 11 numbered chapters in addition to an introductory and a concluding chapter as well as a short preface, a bibliography, an index, and (according to the table of contents) a page "about the author" (allegedly on p. 397, although no such page is to be found). Each chapter has notes at the end of the chapter. The first 10 numbered chapters roughly (but only roughly) correspond to the Republics division into Books (e.g. ch. 2 of TPR covers Rep. Book 2 up to 376c, ch. 3 covers the rest of Book 2 and Book 3 up to 412b etc.). The discussion in each chapter is centered on the major theme of each Book: theories of justice in ch. 1, the origin of the city in ch. 2, education of the guardians in ch. 3 etc. Thus chapters 110 constitute almost a continuous running commentary on the whole dialogue. Chapter 11 discusses Platos Timaeus and is the only chapter focusing on material outside of the Republic. As Dorter notes in the introduction, there has long been widespread dispute over the organizational principles of the Republic. It has, for example, been argued that Book 1 is an earlier treatise to which the rest of the Republic was later added, that Book 10 is a later edition etc. This is what C.D.C. Reeve called the second interpretative myth about the Republic, i.e. that it "is neither a philosophically nor an artistically unified work" (Reeve, Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Platos Republic, 1988: xi). It takes the different parts of the dialogue to be fused together somewhat awkwardly to create a Frankenstein-esque dialogue. This myth which emphasizes the disunity of the dialogue probably has few serious defenders today. Like Reeve, Dorter rejects it. His fundamental insight is that the (seemingly rough) transitions in the dialogue actually serve its organizational scheme (the organizational scheme with which Dorter is working is laid out in table I.1 on p. 7) and that a pattern of development of models from simple ones to more complex ones throughout the dialogue serves the same overall purpose (p. 369). Dorter notes a structural symmetry between Books 1 and 10, that Book 10 seems structurally to mirror Book 1. Books 24 describe the rise of the just city whereas Books 89 portray the decline of the city and injustice, again structurally mirroring