Socrates and Philosophy in the Dialogues of Plato

by Sandra Peterson

• ISBN13: 9780521190619
• ISBN10: 0521190614
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-04-18
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

In Plato's Apology, Socrates says he spent his life examining and questioning people on how best to live, while avowing that he himself knows nothing important. Elsewhere, however, for example in Plato's Republic, Plato's Socrates presents radical and grandiose theses. In this book Sandra Peterson offers a new hypothesis which explains the puzzle of Socrates' two contrasting manners. She argues that the apparently confident doctrinal Socrates is in fact conducting the first step of an examination: by eliciting his interlocutors' reactions, his apparently doctrinal lectures reveal what his interlocutors believe is the best way to live. She tests her hypothesis by close reading of passages in the Theaetetus, Republic and Phaedo. Her provocative conclusion, that there is a single Socrates whose conception and practice of philosophy remain the same throughout the dialogues, will be of interest to a wide range of readers in ancient philosophy and classics.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
List of abbreviations	p. xiv
Preface	p. xv
Opposed hypotheses about Plato's dialogues	p. 1
A datum: the two different modes of speaking of Plato's Socrates	p. 1
Two hypotheses to explain the datum	p. 3
More on the grand hypothesis and my alternative	p. 5
One approach that leads naturally to my alternative hypothesis	p. 7
A second approach to my hypothesis from four observations	p. 8
This book's plan to discuss the Socrates of Plato's dialogues	p. 12
The author Plato and the character Socrates	p. 14
Plato and the reader	p. 15
Socrates in the Apology	p. 17
Looking for the Socrates of the Apology	p. 17
The label ôwiseö is a terrible slander	p. 19
Socrates is neither an investigator of nature nor a sophist	p. 24
Socrates is not a sage	p. 27
The thoughtfulness (phronêsis) that Socrates considers so important	p. 30
The ôgreatest thingsö	p. 32
Why the label ôwiseö is a terrible slander	p. 33
Socrates in the Apology sometimes echoes his accusers	p. 36
While knowing nothing big, Socrates does know some things	p. 42
Socrates' knowledge that the god orders him to test people is not big	p. 47
The Socrates of the Apology	p. 56
Socrates in the digression of the Theaetetus: extraction by declaration	p. 59
The digression and its setting	p. 59
The first part of the digression	p. 61
An acute interpretative problem	p. 62
Theodorus	p. 66
Extraction by declaration	p. 67
Reflections on the extraction from Theodorus	p. 71
The second half of the digression: homoiôsis theô(i)	p. 74
The solution to our problems about the digression	p. 85
Conclusion: Theodorus again, and Theaetetus	p. 86
Socrates in the Republic, part I: speech and counter-speech	p. 90
Strangeness and discontinuity	p. 90
Question and answer discussion in book 1	p. 93
A different kind of conversation in books 2-10: speech against speech	p. 98
A question about Glaucon and a temporary puzzle about Socrates	p. 101
Jostling conventions: question-and-answer conversation within persuasive speech	p. 103
Glaucon and Adeimantus require of Socrates a made-to-order speech	p. 105
The city of books 2-10 is Glaucon's, built under a condition he imposes	p. 107
The ôbestö city Socrates describes in the Timaeus	p. 115
Three reasons against finding Socrates committed to his proposals in books 2-10	p. 118
Socrates in the Republic, part II: philosophers, forms, Glaucon, and Adeimantus	p. 120
When can we say that Socrates does not believe proposals he makes in books 2-10?	p. 120
Socrates'depiction of the philosopher	p. 121
Glaucon's agreements about forms in books 5-7 do not survive examination	p. 125
What Adeimantus accepts concerning philosophers does not survive examination	p. 136
What can we conclude from the description of the philosopher for Adeimantus?	p. 146
The effect of distancing Socrates from the content of his speech in books 2-10	p. 147
The characters of Glaucon and Adeimantus	p. 149
The Socrates of the Republic	p. 160
The piety of Socrates' speech to Plato's brothers and its worth for Plato's readers	p. 163
Socrates in the Phaedo: another persuasion assignment	p. 166
The famous proposals of the Socrates of the Phaedo	p. 166
Setting and participants	p. 166
The emphasis on persuasion	p. 172
Remarks on the logical structure of Socrates' persuasive argument	p. 176
ôTrue philosophersö	p. 182
Socrates is not among the ôtrue philosophersö he describes	p. 190
Why is Socrates not more straightforward?	p. 193
Others' conceptions of philosophy in the Euthydemus, Lovers, and Sophist	p. 196
Comparison of some accounts of philosophy	p. 196
The conception of philosophy of an unnamed observer in the Euthydemus	p. 198
The Lovers as a compendium of current conceptions of philosophy	p. 201
The setting of the Sophist	p. 205
The Eleatic visitor's conception of philosophy	p. 207
Why does the Eleatic visitor not count Socratic cleansing refutation as philosophy?	p. 210
Socrates and Plato in Plato's dialogues	p. 216
Socrates in Plato's dialogues	p. 216
What does Socrates believe?	p. 218
Socrates and Plato according to Kahn	p. 219
The Delphic oracle and a problem for two views about Plato's development	p. 220
Development and Plato's creativity	p. 221
The testimony of Aristotle about doctrines of Plato	p. 224
More about Plato	p. 229
Something else to explain and a pure speculation	p. 230
A possible objection: the traditional interpretation of Plato	p. 231
Plato's doctrines	p. 233
The argument of love; Plato and the historical Socrates	p. 234
Socrates and philosophy	p. 236
Which of Plato's dialogues call Socrates a philosopher?	p. 236
Classification of previously considered passages	p. 237
Some more statements from observers	p. 238
More passages in which Socrates suggests a conception of the philosopher	p. 240
Passages of Socrates' self-description	p. 242
Why did Socrates, as depicted, call his activity ôphilosophizingö?	p. 244
One possible reason why Socrates calls his own activities ôphilosophizingö	p. 246
Another possible reason why Socrates calls his activities ôphilosophizingö	p. 248
Plato and philosophy: one view	p. 250
Plato and philosophy: a second view	p. 254
Socrates, philosophy, and Plato	p. 259
Bibliography	p. 262
Index of passages cited	p. 277
General index	p. 286
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