Socrates in the Platonic Dialogues

Plato wrote his philosophy in the dialogue form. In his dialogues, a character called Socrates often takes a major role, though he does not always have a clear doctrine to deliver. Where does Plato stand when his Socrates character is asserting some view or denying that someone else’s view is coherent? Where does the reader stand? Does Plato have a message to convey to his reader? If so, how does that message relate to what the Socrates in the dialogue is saying to his interlocutors? In this paper I shall explore this issue about the relation between Plato and the Socrates character in his dialogues.1 I shall illustrate my discussion with reference to one controversial issue, namely the apparent contradiction between Socrates’s views on pleasure as they appear in the last part of the Protagoras and in his refutation of Cal-licles in the third part of the Gorgias. In the Protagoras Socrates per-suades Protagoras that goodness is identical with pleasure. H