This book offers extremely careful and detailed criticisms of some of the most important assumptions scholars have brought to bear in beginning the process of [Platonic] interpretation. It goes on to offer a new way to group the dialogues, based upon important facts in the lives and philosophical practices of Socrates, the main speaker in most of Plato's dialogues, and of Plato himself.

Both sides of Nails's argument are well worth attention - the negative side, which exposes a great deal of diversity in a field which often claims to have achieved a consensus, and the positive side, which insists that we must attend to what we know of these philosophers' lives and practices, if we are to make a serious attempt to understand why Plato wrote the way he did, and why his writing seems to depict different philosophies and even different approaches to philosophizing.