Rival Lovers

This is another pedantic and narrow-minded dialog that Plato did not write.  The most interesting thing about it is probably that it is not told directly as a dialog; Socrates relates the conversation from memory in the first person.  The conversation itself finds Socrates arguing with some yutes about the definition of philosophy.  Most of it is spent shooting down the idea that the philosopher is just a jack of all trades, who knows a little something about everything.  That would just make the philosopher into a pentathlete, who wins by finishing second in every event.  Instead, this Socrates claims that the philosopher must possess a positive and authoritative skill or expertise in their own right.  In other words, he argues for the old view of philosophy as the queen of skills, the knowledge that will order all the other knowledges.  In this case that's the knowledge of justice or good sense, which essentially seems to boil down to how to give people orders and put everything in its rightful place.  It's a completely boring and aristocratic defintion of philosophy that doesn't seem to have much of anything to do with the vision of it we saw in Phaedo.