The figure of Socrates divides the history of Western thought into two parts. It inaugurates a model of philosophy that shaped all subsequent tradition with the sole force of its influence and the totemic aura from his tragic death. There were many accounts of what happened, but none of them overshadowed Plato's Apology of Socrates as a fundamental text for entering into the details of the trial and sentence. In this context, the opacity of this text is rarely taken into (...) account. It seems to be a testimonial document, a quasi-stenographic version of the process, but it is not. In fact, we are interested in referring to a fact that has been noted but not entirely dimensioned: Plato's Apology of Socrates presents similarities impossible to attribute to mere chance with Gorgias’ Apology of Palamedes. Why does this Platonic text present curious intertextual relationships with a rhetorical exercise based on mythical figures in the climate of the promotion of rhetoric? We will try to answer this question appealing to its link with the origin of the Socratic dialogue. (shrink)

The concept of human wisdom is fundamental for an understanding of the Apology. But it has not been properly understood. The received interpretations offer insufficient resources for explaining how Socrates could have been humanly wise before Apollophilosophiaeven though he did not know that he did. The analysis is confirmed by its resolution of some enduring difficulties in the interpretation of Apology, in particular, the question of why Socrates continued to search for knowledge he thought impossible to attain.

Section 1 of this essay distinguishes between four interpretations of Socratic intellectualism, which are, very roughly: a version in which on any given occasion desire, and then action, is determined by what we think will turn out best for us, that being what we all, always, really desire; a version in which on any given occasion action is determined by what we think will best satisfy our permanent desire for what is really best for us; a version formed by the (...) assimilation of to, labelled the ‘standard’ version’ by Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith, and treated by them as a single alternative to their own interpretation; and Brickhouse and Smith’s own version. Section 2 considers, in particular, Brickhouse and Smith’s handling of the ‘appetites and passions’, which is the most distinctive feature of interpretation. Section 3 discusses Brickhouse and Smith’s defence of ‘Socratic studies’ in its historical context, and assesses the contribution made by their distinctive interpretation of ‘the philosophy of Socrates’. One question raised in this section, and one that is clearly fundamental to the existence of ‘Socratic studies’, is how different Brickhouse and Smith’s Socrates turns out to be from Plato himself, i.e., the Plato of the post-‘Socratic’ dialogues; to which the answer offered is that on Brickhouse and Smith’s interpretation Socratic moral psychology becomes rather less distinguishable from its ‘Platonic’ counterpart—as that is currently understood—than it is on the interpretation they oppose. (shrink)

The framework of this paper is a defence of Burnet's construal ofApology30b 2-4. Socrates does not claim, as he is standardly translated, that virtue makes you rich, but that virtue makes money and everything else good for you. This view of the relation between virtue and wealth is paralleled in dialogues of every period, and a sophisticated development of it appears in Aristotle. My philological defence of the philosophically preferable translation extends recent scholarly work on εἶναι in Plato and Aristotle (...) to γίγνεσθαι, which is the main verb in the disputed sentence. When attached to a subject, both verbs make a complete statement on their own, but a statement that is further completableby adding a complement. The important point is that the addition of a complement does not change the meaning of the verb from existence to the copula. Proving this is a lengthy task which takes me into some of the deeper reaches of Platonic and Aristotelian ontology, and into discussion of whether Greek ever acquired a verb that corresponds to modern verbs of existence. I conclude that even when later authors such as Philo Judaeus, Sextus Empiricus and Plotinus debate what we naturally translate as issues of existence, none of the verbs they use can be said to have existential meaning. (shrink)

Over the last decades we have seen an increased interest in forensic rhetoric in Plato's dialogues, notably in relation to hisApology. However, little interest has been paid to this strain of rhetoric in relation to theGorgias. In this article I focus on one notion, βοήθεια, as it was discussed in Plato'sGorgias. This notion had a wide currency in forensic rhetoric in classical Athens.