Plato's Apology and Crito: Two Recent StudiesSocrates: Philosophy in Plato's Early Dialogues. Gerasimos Xenophon SantasLaw and Obedience: The Arguments of Plato's Crito. A. D. Woozley

Abstract

In the Crito, Socrates refuses an opportunity to escape from jail, and, to justify his decision, he embraces a philosophy of law that appears to condemn all illegal acts whatever. Yet this dialogue insists that one should never, in any circumstances, voluntarily do what is unjust. What then of unjust laws? Are they possible? If so, are we to obey them and thus do what is unjust, or disobey them and thus act illegally? Did Socrates simply fail to realize that his commitments to justice and legality might conflict? This problem is compounded by an apparent conflict, in tone and substance, between the Apology and the Crito. In the former work, Socrates boasts that he ignored an unjust order of the Thirty Oligarchs, and he says that, if his present jurors told him to give up philosophy, he would disobey them too. Yet why should the Crito's sweeping condemnation of political disobedience apply to escape from jail but not also to the defiance Socrates displays in the Apology? New answers to these familiar questions appear in two recent books. G. Santas's Socrates, a work that covers diverse topics in Plato's early dialogues, contains a lengthy and subtle analysis of the Apology and Crito. His central idea is that the Crito presents prima facie reasons in favor of obeying the law, and, as the Apology indicates, these reasons can be outweighed by conflicting considerations. Accordingly, there will sometimes be circumstances-the Crito provides one example-in which obeying the law is obligatory, while there will be other circumstancesmentioned in the Apology-which call for disobedience. A different approach is adopted by A. D. Woozley in a different sort of book. He focuses primarily on the Crito, and his concern is not simply to interpret this dialogue but also to subject its legal rigorism to detailed criticism. He finds its arguments interestingly bad, and, unlike Santas, he believes there is no way to resolve the tension between those passages that require subservience to authority and those that permit disobedience. The Crito's