Abstract
Abstract I said in the last chapter that we should pay special attention to the presuppositions about human nature that governed Socrates’ mission. In this chapter, we examine these and draw out their political implications. We pay special attention to Socrates’ intellectualism, a view widely associated with the historical Socrates and espoused in Plato’s early dialogues. According to the Magna Moralia, the historical Socrates’ conception of human nature was deficient in the following way: According . . . to Socrates, all the virtues arise in the reasoning part of the soul, from which it follows that, in making the various virtues branches of knowledge, he ignores the irrational parts of the soul, and thus ignores passion and the moral character. (1182a18–23)
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