| To the best of my knowledge (Ph.D in cognitive related stuff), what I wrote was correct. Neither do we know with any certainty that Plato's work was written by one author -- it may have been shared work by many authors. 'Plato' may have been the honourific for a student of Socrates. We simply don't know. With Karamazov, we do know it was a character. That's a pretty significant difference (in court, for example, one would get you convicted, the other would not).
As I said, the common opinion is that Socrates was a real person, and he taught Plato (this is pretty widely accepted; there are a lot of sources other than Plato that confirm the life of Socrates and his role as a teacher). Plato wrote down some of what Socrates said, and then began to modify it before writing his own ideas down. There are rather distinct sylistic differences in the language between the socratic dialogues and Plato's own writing, while displaying startling internal consistency in style, and the ideas are consonant with other writings (Xenophon and Aristophanes, primarily). This indicates a single source. It does change over the course of the dialogues (as I said, the earlier ones are almost certainly Socrates; the latter are less obvious).
This is really a secondary, and largely unimportant argument. The most important point is that the philosophical ideas of the Socrates' character and of Plato are quite distinct, and both have their own strengths and weaknesses. |