Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher
Gregory Vlastos
Language: English
Pages: 334
ISBN: 0801497876
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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.
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1981 : 366-8, He clears up well what remains most unckar in the common use of" re\·enge .. : cf. the definition of the word in the O.E.D. to which I refer in the text belov..·. 1 Socrates' rejection of retaliation r. \Vhile inflicting a harm on the wrongdoer is common to punishment and revenge, doing him a \vrong is not: to punish "' wrongdoer is not to '"-rong him. To the return of wrong for wrong, which is normal in ;-e-;.-enge, puHibhmenr gi,·es absoi u rely no quarter: those who apply the.
First place, the ironies Xenophon puts into the portrait ha,·e little doctrinal significance. They contribute nothing to the elucidation of Socrates' philosophy because Xenophon systematically ignores those very features of ic which Socrates wants to be understood as "complex ironies" of the son he illustrates in making his hero say he is a procurer and has a charming nose. I mean the 32 I shall be emplo:-'ing this term here and hereafter throughout the book as a quasi-technical term, harking.
Change. He holds that while all parts of the sensible world are constantly changing, no part of the world of Forms can change at all: in their case immutability is of the very essence of their being. So much SE could ha\·e been expected to grant. He might well have thought it a strict consequence of the assumption that every form is self-identical in each of the distinct temporal occurrences which instantiate it. This seems to be the plain implication of such a question, •·Is not the pious the.
That this is the crux of the difference be;\\een Socrates' and Plato's conception of the i5Ea/Et5os of their respecti,·e inquiries. 1 The evidence nf Aristotle and Xenophon 93 subsequent one to Plato. 43 As Aristotle understands the matter all of it is Plato's: Socrates has no part in it. So when Aristotle comes ac~oss statements in some of P! Fi.x I con~ider it the last of the Elenctic Dialogue~. corn. urring "·lth the ,.,,·idelv held opininn that on good jn.ternal c\·idence it 1nay be dated a L, or clo;e to~ Plato ·s return Ji·01n the fint journey to Sicily: sl'e e.g. Dodds. 1~~59: rsiff.: Irwin~ 1979: j-8. -J.O Here Socrates is misspt'aking hin1 ..:;eJr: '"hat he says. strictly rn1.d. suggest5 that a singk clenchus could produce an denctic rf'fLJ.rntion of a fabr:> the~i:;. \\l1ich would be sureh· \\rong: as I pointed ouc in.