20th-century debates over how Augustine’s thought developed across his dialogues and the historicity of the earliest of them have set scholarly agendas at odds with the dialogues themselves. Over time, scholars have come to see them as poorly composed. This study seeks to articulate the philosophical/pedagogical method at play in the dialogues by using the earliest of them, Contra Academicos, as a programmatic work (ch 1). Applying its method to the remaining dialogues allows us to see how each, despite plurality of content, is tightly unified around a single pedagogical project (ch 3-5, 7), in what ways this project is ‘Platonic’ (ch 2), and how the earliest dialogues operate as a set (ch 6).