Sometimes citations drive me crazy. I’m just correcting one

Plato, & Emlyn-Hughes, C. (Eds.). (2005). Early Socratic Dialogues. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Eagle-eyed readers will spot several things wrong with this citation, as my supervisors did. You may have noticed that Emlyn Hughes was probably an unlikely editor of classical philosophy. However, that example of my mind wandering aside, it still doesn’t look good.

First, there’s the way that EndNote won’t allow me an author to an edited book. So either Plato becomes an editor, or Chris Emlyn-Jones (as he is more accurately styled) becomes an author. The other option is that I remember to correct this manually at the last minute, without giving EndNote a chance to change it.

And then there’s the date. The implication that Plato wrote up the early Socratic dialogues in 2005 is clearly crazy. On the other hand, (2005 / c300BCE) also looks completely wrong. 2005 is probably the accepted way of doing this sort of citation. But I’m not really citing the individual edition; I’m connecting asynchronous dialogue to a long tradition of educational dialogue, which doesn’t work if I only go back three years.

And don’t even start me on the subject of citing and dating Vygotsky…