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From, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. I, The early Presocratics and the Pythagoreans, Cambridge University Press, 1962, pp. 1-25.
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Page 15
Plato's was not a static mind. What I have said so far probably represents not unfairly his convictions in middle life, as expressed in the great dialogues of that period, especially the Meno, Phaedo, Republic and Symposium. From this root sprang his political theory, aristocratic and authoritarian. Later it became apparent to him that the doctrine of eternal, transcendent forms, which he had accepted with a partly religious enthusiasm, entailed serious intellectual difficulties. As a theory of knowledge it demanded further investigation, nor did the relations between forms and particulars, or between one form and another, lend themselves easily to rational explanation. Plato did not hesitate to tackle these problems, and in doing so was led to produce the critical writings which in the view of some twentieth-century philosophers constitute his most important philosophical achievement, notably the Parmenides, Theaetetus and Sophist. The Parmenides raises, without solving, a number of difficulties involved in the theory of forms, the Theaetetus is an inquiry into the nature of knowledge, and the Sophist, in a discussion of methods of classification, of the relations between the most comprehensive forms, and of the different senses of 'not-being', lays the foundations for much future work in logic.
Plato retained to the end a teleological and theistic view of nature. The Timaeus contains a cosmogony which sets out to show the primacy of a personal mind in the creation of the world: it was designed by God's intelligence to be the best of all possible worlds. Yet God is not omnipotent. The world must ever fall short of its ideal model since its raw material is not made by God but given, and contains an irreducible minimum of stubbornly irrational 'necessity' . That the world is the product of intelligent design is argued again in his last work, the Laws, as the climax of a detailed legislative scheme. His aim is to undermine the sophistic antithesis of nature and law: law is natural, and if the 'life according to nature' is the ideal, then it should be a law-abiding life.
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Reference address : https://ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-Greece/guthrie-history-intro.asp?pg=15
