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.

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.

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)

There is a wide consensus among scholars that Plato’s Socrates is wrong to trust in reason and argument as capable of converting people to the life of philosophy. In this paper, I argue for the opposite. I show that Socrates employs a more sophisticated strategy than is typically supposed. Its key component is the use of philosophical argument not to lead an interlocutor to rationally conclude that he must change his way of life but rather to cause a certain affective (...) experience, one that can be effective at changing his beliefs about how best to live. (shrink)