Book reviewed in this article: Principles of Biomedical Ethics. By Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress.

This long-awaited study of the most enigmatic figure of Greek philosophy reclaims Socrates' ground-breaking originality. Written by a leading historian of Greek thought, it argues for a Socrates who, though long overshadowed by his successors Plato and Aristotle, marked the true turning point in Greek philosophy, religion and ethics. The quest for the historical figure focuses on the Socrates of Plato's earlier dialogues, setting him in sharp contrast to that other Socrates of later dialogues, where he is used as a (...) mouthpiece for Plato's often anti-Socratic doctrine. At the heart of the book is the paradoxical nature of Socratic thought. But the paradoxes are explained, not explained away. The book highlights the tensions in the Socratic search for the answer to the question 'How should we live?' Conceived as a divine mandate, the search is carried out through elenctic argument, and dominated by an uncompromising rationalism. The magnetic quality of Socrates' personality is allowed to emerge throughout the book. Clearly and forcefully written, philosophically sophisticated but entirely accessible to non-specialists, this book will be of major importance and interest to all those studying ancient philosophy and the history of Western thought. (shrink)

This exceptional book examines and explains Plato's answer to the normative question, "How ought we to live?" It discusses Plato's conception of the virtues; his views about the connection between the virtues and happiness; and the account of reason, desire, and motivation that underlies his arguments about the virtues. Plato's answer to the epistemological question, "How can we know how we ought to live?" is also discussed. His views on knowledge, belief, and inquiry, and his theory of Forms, are examined, (...) insofar as they are relevant to his ethical view. Terence Irwin traces the development of Plato's moral philosophy, from the Socratic dialogues to its fullest exposition in the Republic. Plato's Ethics discusses Plato's reasons for abandoning or modifying some aspects of Socratic ethics, and for believing that he preserves Socrates' essential insights. A brief and selective discussion of the Statesmen, Philebus, and Laws is included. Replacing Irwin's earlier Plato's Moral Theory (Oxford, 1977), this book gives a clearer and fuller account of the main questions and discusses some recent controversies in the interpretation of Plato's ethics. It does not presuppose any knowledge of Greek or any extensive knowledge of Plato. (shrink)

This book proposes a new paradigm for the interpretation of Plato's early and middle dialogues. Rejecting the usual assumption of a distinct 'Socratic' period in the development of Plato's thought, this view regards the earlier works as deliberate preparation for the exposition of Plato's mature philosophy. Differences between the dialogues do not represent different stages in Plato's own thinking but rather different aspects and moments in the presentation of a new and unfamiliar view of reality. Once the fictional character of (...) the Socratic genre is recognised, there is no reason to regard Plato's early dialogues as representing the philosophy of the historical Socrates. The result is a unified interpretation of all of the dialogues down to the Republic and the Phaedrus. (shrink)

Plato's thinking on courage, manliness and heroism is both profound and central to his work, but these areas of his thought remain under-explored. This book examines his developing critique of both the notions and embodiments of manliness prevalent in his culture, and his attempt to redefine them in accordance with his own ethical, psychological and metaphysical principles. It further seeks to locate the discussion within the framework of his general approach to ethics, an approach which focuses on concepts of flourishing (...) and virtue, rather than on consequences or duty. The question of why courage is necessary in the flourishing life in its turn leads to Plato's bid to unify the noble and the beneficial and the tensions this unification creates between human and divine ideals. The issue of manliness also raises problems of gender: does Plato conceive of the ethical subject as human or male? (shrink)

This paper aims at analysing the problem of remainder and regret in moral conflicts. Four different approaches are subject of investigation: a moral-theoretical strategy aimed at consistency; a narrative approach of moral coherence and open consensus; Plato's moral methodology of dialogue and aporetic resolution of moral conflicts and finally, an approach deduced from Greek tragedy of emotional resolution of moral conflicts. A central argument is that since there exists no theoretically convincing way of solving the problem of remainder and regret, (...) the attention should instead be directed towards finding alternative ways of coping with this problem. The three last approaches subject of investigation attempt - each in their own way - to do this. Teaching medical ethics to medical students and the burning issue of medical fallibility is used to demonstrate the relevance of these forms of resolution in a medical context. (shrink)

This work makes a case for the Platonic idea of logos as an option for interpreting the role of reason in our lives, as opposed to the roles assigned to reason by Descartes and the Cartesians.

I describe an aporetic structure found in certain dialogues and explain the structure by showing how it serves, better than expository writing, the pedagogical goal of avoiding giving readers a false sense of knowledge in producing understanding of a philosophical account.

In the Introduction to her recent translation of the Poetics, Miss Hubbard astutely recognizes the intellectual orientation of Aristotle's aesthetic theory. She observes that for Aristotle the concept of mimesis is intimately connected with that of mathesis and thus that the basic pleasure of art is the intellectual pleasure involved in learning. She then correctly identifies two levels of the learning process involved in mimesis: on a lower level it signifies the way in which children learn their first lessons but (...) on a much more sophisticated plane it denotes a process by which our understanding of ‘moral facts and moral possibilities’ is deepened. She perceptively concludes that if art is to achieve the goal set for it by Aristotle, it must have a significant relationship to ultimate truth. (shrink)

The main title of this work is a little misleading. Hobbs does not begin to consider in any detail Plato’s relation to traditional Greek models of the hero until chapter 6, nearly two-thirds of the way through the book. In fact, Hobbs’s treatment of Plato’s re-working of the hero-figure is embedded in a nexus of themes revolving round the Greek virtue of andreia and its psychological basis in that part of the soul that Plato in the Republic calls the thumos. (...) Commonly translated ‘spirit’, the term is notoriously hard to render by a single English equivalent. Plato’s conception of this human drive can be captured, according to Hobbs’s succinct phrase, as “the need to believe that one counts for something”. (shrink)

Scholars often assume that Plato could have accomplished his purposes by employing an essay format, and that most of the views presented and defended by the philosophic masters in the dialogues are views he held when he composed those dialogues. Chapter 1 of this dissertation raises problems with these assumptions and discusses how Kenneth Sayre, Mitchell Miller, and Stanley Rosen assess the significance of Plato's dialogue form in the face of such problems. ;After providing a brief sketch of medical and (...) psychiatric ideas current in Plato's day and pointing out a large number of passages from the dialogues in which Plato employs these ideas, Chapter 2 propounds and makes a preliminary case for three interrelated theses. First, it maintains that many of the dialogues depict Socrates and the other masters as attempting to engender or restore health in the polis of Athens and in the souls of individuals who had influence on the life of the polis. Second, it holds that many of the dialogues are depictions of conversations between philosophers and nonphilosophers which are importantly like interactions between physicians and patients in Greek medical practice, and that the dialogues function as quasi-psychiatric case histories presented by Plato to his readers. Third, it maintains that in a typical dialogue Plato depicts a philosopher first as diagnosing what is wrong with certain attitudes or opinions held by his interlocuters and then as attempting to do therapy on the interlocuters. ;Chapters 3 and 4 attempt to confirm these theses by showing that they cast a great deal of light on the literary structures of the middle-period Symposium and the late-period Philebus. The final chapter notes that a psychiatric view of the significance of the dialogue form suggests the possibility of a new understanding of the relationship between the Philebus and the Phaedo. (shrink)