In Plato's Euthydemus, Socrates claims that the possession of epistēmē suffices for practical success. Several recent treatments suggest that we may make sense of this claim and render it plausible by drawing a distinction between so-called “outcome-success” and “internal-success” and supposing that epistēmē only guarantees internal-success. In this paper, I raise several objections to such treatments and suggest that the relevant cognitive state should be construed along less than purely intellectual lines: as a cognitive state constituted at least in part (...) by ability. I argue that we may better explain Socrates' claims that epistēmē suffices for successful action by attending to the nature of abilities, what it is that we attempt to do when acting, and what successful action amounts to in the relevant contexts. These considerations suggest that, contrary to several recent treatments, the success in question is not always internal-success. (shrink)

Bobonich argues that, in the Laws, Plato is committed to the view that the goodness of all goods entirely distinct from virtue is dependent on the virtue of their possessor. He suggests further that Plato's commitment to this dependency thesis is best explained by Plato's commitment to two other theses: (1) that knowledge is sufficient for all virtue, and (2) that the goodness of goods entirely distinct from virtue depends on their possessor's knowledge of the nature of their goodness. While (...) I agree with Bobonich that Plato maintains his commitment to a strong relationship between virtue, knowledge, and happiness in the Laws, I disagree with the details of Bobonich's account of this relationship. (shrink)

Practical wisdom (hereafter simply “wisdom”) is the intellectual virtue that enables a person to make reliably good decisions about how, all-things-considered, to live and conduct herself. Because wisdom is such an important and high-level achievement, we should wonder: what is the nature of wisdom? What kinds of skills, habits and capacities does it involve? Can real people actually develop it? If so, how? I argue that we can answer these questions by modeling wisdom on expert decision-making skill in complex areas (...) like firefighting. I develop this expert skill model of wisdom using philosophical argument informed by relevant empirical research. I begin in Chapter 1 by examining the historical roots of analogies between wisdom and practical skills in order to motivate the expert skill model. In Chapter 2, I provide the core argument for the expert skill model. I then use the remaining chapters to pull out the implications of the expert skill model. In Chapter 3, I show that the expert skill model yields practical guidance about how to develop wisdom. In Chapter 4, I address the objection, due to Daniel Jacobson, that wisdom is not a skill that humans could actually develop, since skill development requires a kind of feedback in practice that is not available for all-things-considered decisions about how to live. Finally, in Chapter 5, I apply the expert skill model to the question, much discussed by virtue ethicists, of whether a wise person deliberates using a comprehensive and systematic conception of the good life. (shrink)

This article offers a new formulation of the Socratic principle known as the Principle of the Sovereignty of Virtue. It is divided in three sections. In the first section I criticize Vlastos’ formulation of the PSV. In the second section I present the weighing model of practical deliberation, introduce the concepts of reason for action, simple reason, sufficient reason and conclusive reason that were offered by Thomas Scanlon in Being realistic about reasons, and then I adapt these concepts so as (...) to render them apt to be used in the formulation I intend to offer. In the third section I present my formulation of the PSV using the concepts introduced in the second section and explain why I believe this formulation is better than the one offered by Vlastos. (shrink)

In the Euthydemus, Socrates is presented as an eager student of seemingly trivial arts, earning derision both for desiring to master the peculiar art of Euthydemus and Dionysodorus and for studying the harp in his old age. I explain Socrates’ interest in these apparently trivial arts by way of a novel reading of the first protreptic argument, suggesting that the wisdom Socrates praises is complex in nature, securing the happiness of its possessor only insofar as it is composed of both (...) ordinary productive knowledge and ethically productive knowledge. This reading of the first protreptic makes sense of the otherwise perplexing second protreptic, explaining why Socrates is so keen to identify an art which makes what it uses. Wisdom acts as a reliable source of benefit only insofar as it is a complex composed of multiple different arts and types of knowledge. These arts, however, can only be acquired one at a time – if no single art is capable of combining the powers of both ordinary productive knowledge and ethically productive knowledge in the way that wisdom as a whole does, then the pursuit of wisdom will fail to offer reliable benefit despite the reliably beneficial nature of its possession. Thus, it is appropriate for the Euthydemus to conclude with Socrates telling Crito to take courage and pursue philosophy despite the seemingly harmful effects that its pursuit has had on others. Euthydemus and Dionysodorus represent the danger facing the aspiring philosopher, the possibility of being ruined by independent possession of the particular kind of ordinary productive knowledge on which philosophical activity depends – verbal mastery, the grasp of subtle conceptual distinctions needed both to argumentatively reveal reality and to argumentatively obscure it, to reliably equivocate and to reliably avoid equivocation. (shrink)

My dissertation is devoted to an examination of the resolution of fallacy in Plato's Euthydemus. It is a familiar claim that the Euthydemus champions Socratic argumentation over sophistical or eristic reasoning. No consensus however exists regarding either the nature or philosophical significance of Socrates’ treatment of the fallacies he confronts. I argue that a careful reading of the dialogue reveals that the Socratic response to fallacious reasoning is conducted at two different levels of philosophical sophistication. Socrates relies upon the resources (...) of Socratic dialectic in responding to sophisms due to ignorance of refutation. Insofar as Socratic dialectic is grounded in a grasp of the nature of genuine refutation, the objections it raises to false refutation are fully explanatory. On the other hand, Socrates employs various self-refutation arguments against theses which depend on false assumptions regarding the nature of predication---for example, the thesis that false speaking is impossible. It is however characteristic of Socratic dialectic that this method of examination cannot explain why the sophists’ theses are false. The Socratic response to fallacy in these cases is non-explanatory in this sense. On the other hand, these limitations on Socratic expertise are overcome in other passages in the dialogue which are replete with clues to the reader that point to a genuine explanation and resolution of the sophists’ arguments for their various theses. In particular, the reader is invited at every turn to modify, clarify, or reject various assumptions made by the brothers regarding the nature of predication. Here Plato implicitly relies on the results of what I call higher dialectic. This theory, which receives explicit formulation in the Sophist, is conceptually rich enough to expose and dispose of the various false assumptions upon which the sophists’ theses rest. I conclude that the Euthydemus is concerned to identify Socratic dialectic as only a part of philosophy, and to locate and strictly delimit its epistemological status as lying above eristic and the rhetorical arts, but below that of dialectic as that is conceived in the Republic and even later dialogues---thus anticipating the Sophist’s conception of Socrates as the practitioner of a ‘noble sophistry’, and the elenchus as a propaedeutic to philosophy, which purges the soul of false beliefs. (shrink)

The essay examines the description of virtue as a craft that governs the proper use of possessions in Plato’s Euthydemus and Stoicism. In the first part, I discuss Socrates’ parallel between wisdom and the crafts in the Euthydemus, and the resulting argument concerning the value of external and bodily possessions. I then offer some objections, showing how Socrates’ craft analogy allows one to think of possessions as good and ultimately fails to offer a defense of virtue’s sufficiency for happiness. In (...) the second part, I examine the Stoics’ craft analogy and note a number of differences from Socrates’ account in the Euthydemus. These include the Stoic claim that external advantages never make any contribution to happiness, even when properly used, and the claim that, unlike other crafts, wisdom does not require any external possessions in order to be exercised and yield benefit and happiness. I then place these differences against the backdrop of the debate regarding virtue’s sufficiency for happiness and argue that the Stoic craft model of virtue fares better than its Socratic antecedent. (shrink)