Plato’s waking state ὕπαρ

Grigorios Dikaios seeks a new answer to the old and highly controversial question of how Plato’s three major dialogues – ‘Republic’, ‘Statesman’, and ‘Laws’ – relate to one another. Are the ‘Laws’, Plato’s late masterwork, (not) a refutation of the theses defended in the ‘Republic’? Is the ‘Statesman’ a bridging dialogue – a bridge between ‘Republic’ and ‘Laws’? Why is Socrates entirely absent from the ‘Laws’? Drawing on the often overlooked distinction between dreaming and waking state (ὄναρ / ὀνειρώττειν vs. ὕπαρ) and the double meaning of παράδειγμα (model and example), Dikaios reconsiders the epistemological and political background between these dialogues. Just as the weaver in the ‘Statesman’ interlaces warp and woof, this study attempts to interweave and simultaneously distinguish central aspects of the three dialogues – enabling a comparison from the ‘Republic’ to the ‘Laws’ and back from the ‘Laws’ to the ‘Republic’, from end to beginning and from beginning to end.