This book offers a new theoretical framework for engaging with Plato's dialogues.
This new interpretation of Plato's representation of intellectual development is characterized by an interdisciplinary nature. This interdisciplinarity informs Plato's philosophy, as it is confirmed by the fact that Plato's work is analyzed by researchers whose studies are not focused on ancient philosophy, for instance Marcus Giaquinto's research on the epistemological importance of visual thinking in mathematics. The dialogue between Socrates and Meno's slave provides an opportuninty to consider the epistemological importance of visualization: thinking visually, discoveries about geometry can be made. This awareness of the use of diagrams to make the reader discover leads back to the schematization used in the Republic by Plato to explain what are, for him, the stages of intellectual development of the human being and what are the objects of knowledge pertinent to each phase of cognition.
The connection between diagrams and discovery further prompts reflection on the lack of investigation of the reasons why Plato has chosen a schematization to represent intellectual progress. This book on diagrammatic reasoning is the first attempt to point to this riddle, and to the possible clues which help us to solve it. It leads the reader in an investigation which will show that Plato, describing the stages of human cognitive evolution, poses a logic problem to stimulate the development of the general reasoning abilities of his readers.