Plato's Socrates Research Articles

The Recent Revival of Divine Command Ethics

The question is almost as old as Western philosophy itself: What is the relation of morality to the will of the gods? Plato's Socrates famously asks: Is what is holy holy because the gods approve it, or do they approve it because it is holy?I Within monotheistic religious traditions there is ample historical precedent for disagreeing with Plato and taking morality to be dependent on the will of God. Though theological voluntarism has not been popular among contemporary moral philosophers, there has been a revival of interest in it during the past two decades among analytic philosophers of religion. This revival has been sensitive to the fact that the extreme view according to which divine volitions are wholly arbitrary is just one among many forms of voluntarism and may well not be the most plausible version of the position. I begin this paper by taking stock of what has so far been accomplished in the course of that revival. But my aim is not merely to summarize what has already been done; I also mean to make a contribution to the project of breathing new life into theological voluntarism. So I go on to make a proposal about what should be done next on behalf of this neglected tradition of moral thought, and I then act on my proposal by discussing two promising strategies of argument in support of the view that morality depends on the divine will. One should, of course, be appropriately modest in one's hopes and expectations for success in a project that many philosophers are bound to regard as quixotic. It is most likely not to be expected that philosophers whose deepest loyalties bind them to the predominantly secular assumptions of contemporary academic moral philosophy will be persuaded that theological voluntarism deserves to be taken seriously. It is, however, reasonable to hope that such philosophers can be brought to acknowledge that there are intellectually vital and respectable traditions of moral

The Virtues of Socratic Ignorance

Plato's Socrates denies that he knows. Yet he frequently claims that he does have certainty and knowledge. How can he avoid contradiction between his general stance about knowledge (that he lacks it) and his particular claims to have it?Socrates' disavowal of knowledge is central to his defence in theApology. For here he rebuts the accusation that he teaches – and thus corrupts – the young by telling the jury that he cannot teach just because he knows nothing. Hence his disavowal of knowledge is important to Socrates. Why does he make this claim? And how then can he justify engaging in any philosophical activity at all?

Educating for excellence1

In the present climate, when future developments are the only thing that can command interest, it may seem rather perverse to turn back to Plato, but in trying to think through current educational problems, I do so unashamedly. One of our problems is the naive assumption that there is an easy practical solution to every problem, and Plato's Socrates it an excellent antidote. Besides this, we soon discover that the very issues that seem to perplex us, and the very attitudes that make us despair, are to be found voiced in those subtle dialogues composed more than two thousand years ago some problems are perennial. So we turn to Plato's Meno. Meno comes to Socrates with the question, 'Can excellence be taught? Or can it not be taught but acquired through practice? Or can it neither be acquired through practice nor learned, but something which people possess by nature or in some other way?'2 There is an obvious prior question, 'What is meant by excellence?' The Greek work under discussion is areti. Traditionally it has been translated 'virtue', but it did not simply mean virtue in our sense. It was through Socrates and Plato that aretecame to have a primarily moral connotation. It is this development which led me to turn to Plato when I had been asked to speak about the 'spiritual' dimension of education. 'Spiritual' I want to interpret not in a narrowly religious way though we will turn to religious education later but rather in the broadest possible sense, as something to do with 'values' other than the economic or success-oriented, and including 'virtue' and 'excellence'. Our fundamental question was raised by Plato: can the 'spiritual' be communicated? can 'virtue' be taught? Arete originally meant something like 'prowess', and in the City States of Plato's day it particularly meant political prowess, success, and even skill in a technical or artistic sense. The question Meno asks, then, is this: is it possible to educate people so as to achieve real prowess, skill or success? There were those around who were claiming to do just that for a fee the Sophists. Whether they were able to perform what they claimed to be able to do comes up later in the dialogue. Certainly they could impart techniques, techniques of political persuasion, the art of rhetoric, but all through, one senses, a

Socratic gymnasium in the clouds

Plato and Xenophon ‐ contrary to Dover's interpretation of the Clouds ‐ provide the background to Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates: viewed against that background, Aristophanes’ jokes in the Clouds lose their obscurity, his comedy gains on poignancy and artistic unity; Plato's and Xenophon's Socrates regains historicity.

The Justice of Socrates' Philosopher Kings

As against current notions, which tend to identify the just with the voluntary and thereby to espouse a politically suicidal individualism, Plato's Socrates develops an account of justice that involves coercion, even against the elite, his philosophers, who must be forced from a life of contemplation to rule as kings. This essay suggests, accordingly, that despite the modern emphasis on individual rights, it is Plato who most fully exposes the perplexity of justice and political partnership, and who thus provides the soundest basis for its theoretical examination. It is further argued, against prevailing interpretations, that the manifestation of this perplexity in the Republic -the conflict between Socrates' city and philosophy -is merely provisional, not fundamental. Learning-loving philosophers actually benefit from the political responsibility forced upon them in gaining access to the greatest learning matter, the idea of the good. This result provides stronger support for the reconciliation of the individual to his own citizenship, and thus for public-spiritedness, than might otherwise be available today.

The Formal Charges Against Socrates

The Formal Charges Against Socrates THOMAS C. BRICKHOUSE and NICHOLAS D. SMITH Ar n9a OF PLATO'S Apology, Socrates begins his defense against what he calls the "first" accusers, whose slanders he sees as posing an even greater threat to him than those of the newer accusers, Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon. Because these older accusations are the more dangerous, he undertakes first to defend himself against them. But from 24B to ~8A Socrates elects to address the charges of the "new" accusers by an interrogation of one of them, Meletus , the officiaP author of the indictment against him. This interrogation has been the source of a good deal of puzzlement to scholars, for during the imerrogation Meletus seems to many readers to be ill prepared to defend his own charges coherently. To some, this is a decisive sign that the entire interlude is largely, if not wholly, invented by Plato to discredit Socrates' prosecutors as inept and unprincipled? Other readers see the interrogation We are indebted to Gregory Vlastos, Charles M. Reed, Jean Roberts, Mark McPherran, Ilavid M. Halperin, Walter Englert and the editorial staff of this journal for their helpful suggestions and criticisms of various earlier drafts of this paper, and to the National Endownwm lin the Humanities for helping to fund our research on this topic. All errors, however, are uurs alone. ' Meletus is at least nominally the principal prosecutor of the case, but this of course does not rule out his acting on someone else's behalf. Many believe that Anytus was the real force behind the prosecution (about which, see note 4 l, below). The clearest statement of this position can be found in the treatment of this issue by Reginald Hackforth in The Compositionof Plato'sApology(Cambridge, x933), 1o4-1o. An absurd exueme of this view is argued by Thomas G. West, Plato's Apology of Socrates (Ithaca and London, 1979), 134-5o, who dismisses Socrates' arguments in this section as "among the most ridiculous used by him anywhere in Plato" and see this as proof that the entire interrogation is l'lato's attempt at comedy writing (135). Though we do not take the arguments of this paper as providing evidence for or against the view that Plato's Socrates is an accurate representation of the actual man himself, we do oppose the view that Plato's account in this case must be seen as providing Socrates no serious and substantive defense, for such is precisely what we propose can be lound, even if the defense in question is only one of Plato's invention. ()ne reason for wondering whether this part of Plato's account is his own invention, howincr . we will not take seriously. Someone might wonder whether the incident could take place at [457] 458 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:4 OCTOBER 1985 as showing that neither Socrates nor even Meletus takes the formal charges as the real motive for the prosecution. To Meletus and his collaborators, the formal charges, we are told, are a legal pretext for other complaints that could not themselves legally be prosecuted, but could none the less comprise such a bias against Socrates as to ensure his conviction on the charges they could bring. And on this view, the legal fiction involved was so evident that St)crates would not honor the formal charges with a serious refutation. Instead , he undertook in his interrogation of their nominal author merely to demonstrate to the jury that his prosecutors had shown a careless unconcern for ulorality and the law by employing such patently senseless and unsupportable charges against him.3 In this paper we wish to challenge such established interpretations by showing that both Socrates and his prosecutors may sensibly be taken as having viewed the formal charges as reflecting important issues to be decided by the court, even if (as we are wholly disinclined to doubt) other concerns also influenced the prosecution and outcome of the case? In Part i, we review the meaning of the specific charges themselves. In Part ~, we argue that the three prosecutors can reasonably be assumed to have intended the official indictment to be taken as specifying serious crimes actually...

Socrates: Devious or Divine?

Perhaps happiness can be attributed only to the dead because they are beyond the reach of fortune: but that security is denied to one's reputation. The case of Socrates makes this clear, and it is his reputation which is this paper's theme. For since his death Socrates has been the object of such competing assessments that some have despaired of ever finding the real person executed in Athens in 399 B.C. Although that search need not be fruitless, this study is concerned not so much with the sources of our knowledge of Socrates as with the ways in which Plato's Socrates has been represented and assessed. On the one hand are interpreters who hold him up as a model for life and thought, an ideal figure approaching sainthood if not divinity; and on the other more sinister hand are those who claim to discern under the saint's clothing the sly fox, the devious devil whose major aim is to destroy other people's beliefs and arguments. Socrates has been praised and condemned with fervour since his original trial, and although we will not reach yet another final verdict here, perhaps by canvassing a little of the evidence we may come to understand not only something of his reputations, but also how they find their sources in Plato's own writings.

Aristotle's Anticommunism

This essay examines Aristotle's critical review of Plato's Republic, the focus of which review is restricted, surprisingly, to Socrates' communistic political institutions; Aristotle hardly mentions any of the other important themes developed in the dialogue. For this reason commentators have charged Aristotle with misrepresenting Plato's intention. Against this view, the author finds in Aristotle's anticommunism the most incisive formulation of his political disagreement with Plato's Socrates. Communism will not promote the harmonious articulation of city and man, as Socrates suggests; rather, it undermines the integrity of the political community and precludes the proper development of the best human nature. Aristotle holds that communism thus disrupts the entelechies of both city and man. Modern critiques, by contrast, merely indicate the adverse effects of communism on economic productivity or efficiency. Thus Aristotle's anticommunism is seen to offer for our consideration a dimension of this important issue that is typically neglected in contemporary political argument.

Socrates as Hero

Robert Eisner SOCRATES AS HERO The very first experience that philosophy had on Greek soil, the Sanction of the Seven Sages, is an unmistakable and unforgettable feature of the Hellenic image. Other people have saints; the Greeks have sages. ' Nietzsche Plato composed in a mythomorphic vein, or rather he attempted in his dialogues to superimpose a new kind of myth on the much older palimpsest of the sagas. To do this effectively he had to present Socrates not just heroically, but as a hero far different from the bronzed figures of that timocracy and shame culture whose legacy he resented and whose lingering influence on the Adienian present he was, in his more Utopian moods, determined to eradicate. Hence many of the traditional traits of the Homeric warrior are found in the Platonic Socrates, but they have been substantially modified to sustain the new philosophic content of die hero's role. These revitalized characteristics serve to highlight the radically novel establishment of the hero as philosopher and the philosopher as hero. The heroic comparisons that Socrates and Plato make, delineating a new prototype , risk the inflation of Socrates' ego, to use a modern term for what the Greeks called hubris. In the agonistic world of politicians, sophists, athletes, and lovers, Plato's Socrates stands out as the most erotically powerful intellectual in Athens. Even the chryselephantine Alcibiades shows himself captivated by this most charismatic of pedagogues. The self-proclaimed ignorance of the philosopher restrains him from too overt a display of his pride and arrogance, but the repeated success of his ironic gambits constantly tempts him to press his rhetorical advantages too far. For the Greek who is also a Socratic philosopher and therefore primarily concerned with the problems of the ethical life, the discernment of rational standards , patterns, and paradigms is not only the epistemological road to the examPhilosophy and Literature Vol. 6 Nos. 1 and 2 Pp. 106-118 0190-0031/82/0061-0106 © 1982 by The Johns Hopkins University Press Robert Eisner107 ined life but is also the mimetic way to Virtue.2 For such an individual, questing along new heights of moral speculation, there are older figures for him to model himself on, despite Alcibiades' insistence at Symposium 221c-d that no parallel in the sagas exists for Socrates. With the death of Socrates and the emasculation of political possibilities for civic man after the Peloponnesian War, Plato sought to absorb the external world of battlefield and assembly into the no less contentious inner domain of the soul. As reconstituted or invented by Plato this monde intérieur needed myth for its shores to be made accessible to the likes of mere men, and in this requirement it did not differ from the Troad of the Achaean expedition or the Persia of Xenophon's dreams and deeds.3 What better hero to animate the new myth of the quest for virtue and the forms than the man who was himself entheos, "enthused"? Platonic myth, however, is not simply a matter of a new sort ofhero searching for a new sort of treasure. The several sorts of myths employed in the dialogues are all more or less supplementary in those areas where Logos is more or less deficient. From the ancient point of view human reason is especially weak in science and history, where myth must aim at the truth and explore its ramifications , even if it must take the place of rational knowledge, as in the great central myths of the Timaeus and the Critias. In ethics, however, where human reason is adequate to the task of knowing, myth adds to the rational and speaks to man's passions, as in the accounts of the cave, the chariot of the soul, and Ei^s visit to the Underworld. Ludwig Edelstein remarks on this function of myth: "It rouses and confirms hopes; it enhances courage and allays fears. It is like a charm that one must sing to oneself."4 Unlike the rational certainty obtained through dialectic, the myths provide the reader (the silent but never absent interlocutor of the dialogues) with an essential and otherwise unobtainable conviction. Only myths can ease the rational helplessness of man...

Socrates’ Moral Paradox

In Socratic Paradoxes,2 Gerasimos Santas argues that Plato's Socrates expounds two distinct paradoxes concerning human weakness. The paradox, most thoroughly developed in the Protagora* J, is that no one desires evil (harmful) things and that all who pursue evil (harmful) things do so involuntarily. The that virtue is knowledge and that all who do injustice or wrong do so involuntarily is argued for in the Gorgias .3 Although it is commonly thought that the problem of moral weakness originated with Socrates, Santas' larger claim is that the moral paradox does not really deny the fact of moral weakness and so is far more plausible than it is usually taken to be. The aim of this paper is to represent the bases of the moral paradox so as to make apparent what, at best, is problematical about its conceptual foundations. A clue to the resolution of the paradox is then offered. There is evidence, as Santas points out (p. 158), that in the Gorgias the moral paradox is partly derived from the prudential paradox. A reconstruction of the overall argument to the moral paradox might read as follows. Assume:

Socrates on the Parts of Virtue

Plato represents Socrates as believing in the unity of the virtues, quarreling with those who, like Protagoras or Meno, wish to treat the virtues as distinct objects of inquiry (Protagoras 329c2ff., Meno 71e1ff.). On the other hand, there is good reason to deny that Plato's Socrates believed in the numerical identity of the virtues (cf. Meno 79a3-5). What Socrates did believe, I shall argue, is that the various virtues are one in essence. I shall show what this means and how it clears up prima facie inconsistencies among Plato's early dialogues.If I am right, Socrates’ theory has startling consequences. Since essence is exactly what Socrates wants a definition to state, it follows that all virtues will have one and the same definition. And if this is so, no wonder the quest for separate definitions of virtues fails in every case! For example in the Laches the generals are baffled by Courage because Courage has no private essence and cannot be marked off from the other virtues by stating its essence. Its essence is Virtue entire. That is a radical view, but there are good reasons for attributing it to Socrates.

The Aporias in Plato's Early Dialogues

Although the irony of the Socratic elenchus has long been recognized, little attention has been given to attempting to resolve in detail the aporias in Plato's early dialogues.1 In this paper, I wish to present a few specimen resolutions based on the assumption that the fallacies, omissions, and apparent contradictions producing the aporias are fully intentional on Plato's part.2 The evidence for Plato's deliberateness falls into two main categories: external, or pre-Platonic; and internal, or within Plato's own writings. Into the first category should be placed the fact that before Plato's time deductive techniques and semantic analysis were well developed, intimately related in practice, and repeatedly applied to discussion of philosophical problems. Parmenides' poem presents unprecedented exercise in logical deduction: 3 using geometric reasoning as a model, a metaphysical issue is divided into two cases, and unwanted positions are eliminated by reduction to absurdity. Zeno's paradoxes, which lead to the verge of infinitesimal analysis 4 and reveal an even more thorough mastery of the reductio ad absurdum, suggest also a sophisticated position involving the relativity of movement and the theoretical character of geometric concepts.5 Hippocrates of Chios, who might be called a sophist, though he specialized in the mathematical field, B is probably the inventor of formalized geometric reduction and analysis, both of which as logical techniques are constantly used by Plato's Socrates in the discussion of philosophic issues. Protagoras' dicta and the reports on his work indicate, according to Dupreel's brilliant reconstruction, a pragmatic theory of language, logic, and knowledge.8 Far from denying the principle of contradiction, the great sophist was able to solve the puzzle presented in Parmenides' confusion between a negative predication and a negative existential judgement 9 by an analysis of the relative character

Great Thinkers

Any account of Socrates must necessarily begin with the admission that there is, and always will be, a “problem of Socrates”. He himself wrote nothing, and although soon after his death—possibly even before it—many of his friends and admirers began to write about him, their writings are not reports in any literal sense, but reconstructions or interpretations coloured, to a greater or less degree, by the writer's own interests and prejudices, and inevitably selective in their treatment of a complex personality. Out of the very considerable bulk of this Socratic literature there is left to us in a complete form the work of Xenophon and Plato only, together with some scanty remains of Aeschines and yet scantier fragments of Antisthenes, the reputed founder of the Cynic school. In antiquity it was Aeschines who had the reputation of giving the most faithful picture of the master, a fact which deserves to be borne in mind when we attempt to determine how much of Plato's Socrates preserves the record of the man himself.