'Philosophy' in Plato's Phaedrus

Christopher Moore

doi:10.14195/2183-4105_15_4

Abstract

The Phaedrus depicts the Platonic Socrates’ most explicit exhortation to ‘philosophy’. The dialogue thereby reveals something of his idea of its nature. Unfortunately, what it reveals has been obscured by two habits in the scholarship: (i) to ignore the remarks Socrates makes about ‘philosophy’ that do not arise in the ‘Palinode’; and (ii) to treat many of those remarks as parodies of Isocrates’ competing definition of the term. I remove these obscurities by addressing all fourteen remarks about ‘philosophy’ and by showing that for none do we have reason to attribute to them Isocratean meaning. We thereby learn that ‘philosophy’ does not refer essentially to contemplation of the forms but to conversation concerned with selfimprovement and the pursuit of truth. http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2183-4105_15_4

Highlights

This paper concerns the way Plato presents what he terms ‘philosophy’
We find that Charmides really does have some impor‐ tant conversational abilities
It is true that Socrates does not adumbrate here the sorts of conversations or activities a philosophical association engages in, but he did not do so in the other dialogues we have looked at either, and yet the content of philosophy there was perfectly clear

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This paper concerns the way Plato presents what he terms ‘philosophy’ (philosophia). I ar‐ gue that we have reason to reassess the Republic ‐inspired view that Plato believes philosophy to be contemplation of the forms. Whether an ‘education in philosophy and speeches’ has at its focus constructive or agonistic engagement; probably the ambiguity is deliberate.15 As both the Protagoras and the Charmides show, Socrates uses the term ‘philosophy’ to refer to conversations that follow certain norms of productive engagement and that concern virtues and the possession or transmission of them. Passage [2] does not emphasize what the instances of ‘philosophy’ found in Charmides, Protagoras, and passage [1] emphasize, and that [3], below, may allude to, namely, that philoso‐ phy is a group conversational and mutually ‐improving or benefitting practice It focuses instead on philosophy as a distinct way of life, as something that could define a person’s entire course of existence. Drus, where Socrates prays that his outside and inside coordinate, in [8] the Palinode states that philosophy means acting (publicly) as the mind decides (privately)

A PROTREPTIC TO PHILOSOPHY

CONCLUSION