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This is a collection of seven dialogues by Plato: Ion, Lachès, Lysis, Charmides, Hippias Major, Hippias Minor and Euthydemus. The collection comes with a general and brief introduction to the works of Plato. Then each dialogue comes with an introduction of its own hinting at the recent interpretation and commentaries by recent scholarship.  Even each section of a dialogue starts with a summary of the argument involved in order to make it easy for readers who are new to Plato.


“Early Dialogue�� means that this is the part of Plato’s career in which he has not yet developed his most renowned ideas, mainly the theory of Forms, and the theory of knowledge as a form of recollection. However, in these dialogues he already asks the same questions, about the nature of Greek virtues such as excellence, self mastery and courage, and whether these virtues are a skill to be acquired and for what reason or benefit we ought to pursue them.


Although most of them are definition dialogues, they do end up in the classical Socratic aporia, in which the participants admit their inability to find a clear cut answer to the problem, as a manifestation of their awareness of their own ignorance and the necessity to keep pursuing wisdom. This pursuit of wisdom is done in the Socratic way, by criticizing every self-evident postulate, looking for counterexamples in order to disprove the validity of what seems so universal, and testing for fallacies and biases.


In his investigation he leads his interlocutors from the basic and the familiar into deeper realms of self knowledge. In the Lachès, the discussion on courage starts from a common definition of courage as endurance in battle and ends up in an aporia hinting at a much more sophisticated definition of courage, being some sort of knowledge of what is really fearful and what is not. In the Lysis, a discussion starts about friendship and the motives why someone seeks those who are like or unlike himself, , and ends up with the much elaborated aporia that friendship is about seeking what is good, because of the presence of the bad. All these are ideas which Plato was already considering in the start of his career, and which will blossom later especially in works such as the Republic.  


Another defining trait of the Socratic Method, or the platonic thought, as limits between the two are so blurred in these dialogues, is the analogy between learning, teaching or being good at a skill or at a branch of knowledge and that of virtue. If we can define virtue and know what it is then we can learn it and excel at it, the same way a doctor or a mathematician learns and excels at his discipline. This boils down to the platonic idea that virtue is nothing else than knowledge. In the Charmides, Plato pushes this idea to its limits, exploring the paradoxes of the knowledge of knowledge, meaning of what one actually knows and what one does not know.


Perhaps the most striking peculiarity of these dialogues, one which is essential to their description by scholars as early works of Plato, is his polemicist approach, going even to caricatured depiction of the sophists. In Hippias Major, Hippias Minor and even far more in the Euthydemus we are introduced to the confusing word play and verbiage of the sophists, which they use to prove the thing and it’s contrary, and offer to teach as a wisdom which will help one in all walks of life. Socrates is of course depicted as their antithesis par excellence. As he answers with his usual irony, he always reminds us, not without great humor and wit, of his desire to learn, to escape the confusion of particulars and traps of logical fallacies in order to achieve wisdom which is the real guarantee of the good and the happy life.