Many of Plato's later dialogues date from these decades, and they may reflect Aristotle's contributions to philosophical debate at the Academy.
Anyway the later dialogues do not speak as one.
In the later dialogues the Good clearly operates on a cosmic scale.
And it is these later dialogues that provide the indispensable background for understanding the Laws.
And by articulating this vision, we gain greater understanding of the other later dialogues on which it rests.
If elenchos is used in Plato's later dialogues, it is never again used in the knock-down fashion of the early dialogues.
Questions of psychology, epistemology, ethics and metaphysics (including the metaphysics of value) are explored in great detail and with extraordinary sophistication in the other later dialogues.
This does not mean that there is nothing pertinent in Plato; there is, in the later dialogues, especially the Parmenides (see below).
I will put aside the question about which dialogue Plato composed at which time, along with assumptions about the possible "development" of Plato's views from "earlier" to "later" dialogues.
Second, the ample use Plato makes of the method of collection and division in later dialogues such as the Sophist and the Statesman, seems to pay little heed to problems of ethics, with the exception of the Philebus.
Although the receptacle does not appear by name in any other of the later dialogues, it clearly has affinities to the concept of the apeiron (indefinite or indeterminate) of the metaphysical scheme in the Philebus.
