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 and his particular claims to have it? Socrates' disavowal of knowledge is central to his defence in the Apology. 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? (shrink)

For several decades, scholars of Plato's dialogues have focussed their efforts on understanding Socrates’ philosophy by unravelling the arguments used to establish it. On this view, Socrates’ philosophy is presented in his arguments, and, as Gregory Vlastos says, ‘Almost everything Socrates says is wiry argument; that is the beauty of his talk for a philosopher.’ In this paper I raise questions about what can be learned about Socrates’ philosophy through analysis of his arguments. One critic of what he views as (...) traditional interpretations of Plato—‘the sole frame of reference used by most interpreters of Plato from antiquity to the present’—describes this approach as follows: reading the dialogues to discover Platonic or Socratic doctrines, andthe logic of the arguments on which these doctrines are based.While I subscribe to the first point, I have questions about, the ready contention that Plato's dogmas are based on the arguments through which they are defended in dialogues. (shrink)

In recent years considerable attention has been focused on the question whether Plato ever uses arguments he knows to be sophistical, especially whether he puts such arguments into the mouth of Socrates. Though differing views have been held, at the present time the majority of scholars seem to believe that Plato does not. Though I disagree with this position, I will not attack it directly in this paper. Instead I will discuss what I take to be an important preliminary matter, (...) establishing criteria that can be employed in order to assess the claim that one of Plato's characters does or does not argue sophistically. Since the case of Socrates is by far the most important, I will limit discussion here to the question whether Socrates ever uses sophistry. (shrink)

“Imagine A rather short-sighted person told to read an inscription in small letters from some way off….' So begins the quest for “the real nature of justice and injustice” undertaken in response to the challenge of Glaucon and Adeimantus to show that “justice pays”. It is often alleged that the search leads through analogy to a monster “organic” state that lives by devouring individual rights. I believe that these charges are mistaken. Plato's political theory does not derive from an analogy (...) which makes the state a monster individual with interests superior to and independent of those of ordinary citizens; it derives rather from a doctrine of objective interests discernible by those with special training and ability, interests which later thinkers have taken to be the object of a “real will”, unerring even where a person's mere empirical desires are shortsightedly misdirected. Plato identifies the interests of his ideal state with the objective interests of its citizens , and in his harmonious world, metaphysics, moral psychology, and political organization combine to ensure that those interests need never override individual mundane interests for they never conflict: they coincide. That the whole theory is dubious should not prevent us from seeing that just what the theory is may be clarified by examining the arguments which putatively lead to it, and that those arguments provide grounds for not confounding Plato's theory with others which may reach similar conclusions about political organization and obligation. (shrink)

The Euthydemus presents a brilliantly comic contrast between Socratic and sophistic argument. Socrates' encounter with the sophistic brothers Euthydemus and Dionysodorus exposes the hollowness of their claim to teach virtue, unmasking it as a predilection for verbal pugilism and the peddling of paradox. The dialogue's humour is pointed, for the brothers' fallacies are often reminiscent of substantial dilemmas explored seriously elsewhere in Plato, and the farce of their manipulation is in sharp contrast to the sobriety with which Socrates pursues his (...) own protreptic questioning. But the strategies of this text are complex: the Euthydemus may be a playful satire of the desire to confound, yet beneath its knockabout humour a serious purpose is also visible. (shrink)

Plato's Republic VII suggests that if we ask someone to philosophize when they are too young, they can become corrupted (537e–539d). Republic VII also suggests that to avoid this corruption, we must not expose youth to argument (539a–b). This is not a reasonable option outside of Kallipolis, so a question arises: does Plato describe how to correct corruption if we do not manage to prevent it? This paper shows that a parallel between this passage from Republic VII and a passage (...) from Laws X suggests that he does. Laws X describes an impious man who is corrupted in the same way as the youth exposed to philosophy prematurely in Republic VII. While we leave the youth to his corruption in Republic, the impious man is helped to overcome his corruption in Laws with a refutation followed by a myth (also called a charm). This paper analyses these steps in terms of Plato's psychology, showing that both corruption and correction require a destabilization of the soul, which in these passages is brought about through refutation. This destabilization allows for a reconfiguration, which, with something that can restabilize the soul (for example with myth), can be a reconfiguration for the better. (shrink)

In Athens during the late Classical and Hellenistic periods, it was customary for a man who was borrowing a large sum of money to pledge some property as security for the repayment of his loan. To show that this property was legally encumbered, a flat slab of stone, called a horos, was set up, and an inscription, indicating the nature of the lien on the property, was inscribed on the horos. These horoi served to warn third parties that the man (...) who pledged the property as security was not free to sell it or otherwise alienate it until the loan was repaid. The terminology which is used on these horoi to indicate that the property has been pledged as security varies. On a relatively small number of horoi, only seven, the property is described as ‘lying under ’ for a debt, the amount of which may or may not be specified. The texts found on a far greater number of horoi, some 128 in all, use a different type of expression. On these horoi, the property is said to have been ‘sold on condition of release’ . The terminology used on the horoi to describe this kind of lien presents a striking contrast with that employed by the Attic orators: in their speeches we find the verbs ποκεσθαι and ποτιθναι when it is a question of pledging security for a loan, but never ππρασθαι with the addition of the prepositional phrase π λσει. (shrink)

This paper argues that the concepts of writing and authorship in Plato are associated with monologism and absence rather than presence. The Phaedrus objects to writing precisely insofar as it creates that unre sponsive figure in the field of discursive which we have subsequently called the 'author'. The dialectical preference for question-and-answer is designed to resist anything resembling an author from entering the field of knowledge: the Socratic method resists monologism on epistemological and ethical grounds. However, the Platonic dialogues are (...) split in their signature between a Socrates who speaks and a Socrates who writes. As the Platonic oeuvre increases, so it moves from graphic representation of the oral methods of Socrates to the status of a writing in its own terms. The Phaedrus is a crucial statement in this cultural tran sition. So, far from simply condemning writing, the dialogue accepts Plato's growth as an author of written compositions and his growing sense of himself as an author. What tradition has registered as 'the Socratic problem' can be reviewed according to this competition between the orality of the master and the writerly practices of his pupil. Between dialogism and monologism, speech and writing, absence and presence, Socrates and Plato, the concept of the author is generated. The Plato of the Phaedrus wants to grasp, to theorize, this new figure emerg ing on the chirographic horizons, one whom he would recognize less in Socrates, 'Homer' or Pythagoras than in the mirror of his own text. (shrink)

Theaetetus, asked what knowledge is, replies that geometry and the other mathematical disciplines are knowledge, and so are crafts like cobbling. Socrates points out that it does not help him to be told how many kinds of knowledge there are when his problem is to know what knowledge itself is, what it means to call geometry or a craft knowledge in the first place—he insists on the generality of his question in the way he often does when his interlocutor, asked (...) for a definition, cites instead cases of the concept to be defined. (shrink)

In Aeschines' dialogue Alcibiades, Socrates sees his brilliant young partner's haughty attitude towards the great Themistocles. Thereupon he gives an encomium of Themistocles, a man whose wisdom and arete, great as they were, could not save him from ostracism by his own people. This encomium has an extraordinary effect on Alcibiades: he cries and in his despair places his head upon Socrates' knee, realizing that he is nowhere near as good a man as Themistocles . Aeschines later has Socrates say (...) that he would have been foolish to think he could have helped Alcibiades by virtue of any art or knowledge, but nonetheless by some divine dispensation he has, in virtue of the eros he felt for the youth, been allowed to make him better. (shrink)

The Regress: Knowledge, we like to suppose, is essentially a rational thing: if I claim to know something, I must be prepared to back up my claim by statingmy reasons for making it;and if my claim is to be upheld, my reasons must begood reasons. Now suppose I know that Q; and let my reasons be conjunctively contained in the proposition that R. Clearly, I must believe that R ;equally clearly, I must know that R . Thus if I know (...) that Q, I know that R. But if I know that R, then I must have my reasons, R' for holding R; and, by the same argument, I mustknow that R'. And if R', then R”; and so on, ad infinitum. (shrink)