Plato's Socrates

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1. Difficulty in distinguishing "Socrates" from Plato

2. Early "Socratic" dialogs (written by Plato)
   • e.g., "Euthyphro"
   • focus on attempt to define a term (esp. a value term) [In the case of the "Euthyphro," "impiety"]
   • "Depends upon what you mean by ...."
   • Socrates the midwife
   • characteristic infirmities of definitions:
     • too broad
     • too narrow
     • circular
     • lists of instances
   • with hindsight, Socrates seen as searching for "essences"
   • early dialogs inconclusive
     • hence name: "refutatory" ELENCHUS
     • we lack fixed, settled criteria for the application of our most important terms and concepts

3. A central presupposition of Socrates' enterprise: ARETE requires (presupposes) knowledge

4. Crisis: moral & epistemological:
   • ARETE is knowledge
   • Wisdom is ignorance
   • the threat of the Sophists: collapse of the social order:

5. Socrates' focus: human ARETE ("excellence")
   • ARETE: the essence of a thing conceived as its peculiar excellence
   • Socrates concentrated on terms that both characterize a thing as a member of a class and as an excellent exemplar of the class
   • the search for essences is a search for formal features. (cp. the Pythagoreans)
   • model of knowledge: mathematics

6. Why the actual is not the real for human beings:
   • Socrates' commitment: to pursue human ARETE ("excellence")
   • BUT: that requires knowledge of the Good:
     • of what is good for us
     • of why it is good (for us)
   • what is good for us =(by definition) what we really are
   • THEREFORE: insofar as we do not know what is good (for us) we are not yet good, hence by definition not completely real!
   • human beings (ANTHROPOI) are essentially incomplete
   • the real is the ideal

7. Philosophy is the "art & practice of dying" (Phaedo)
   [Our Ideal is realizable, if at all, only in another life.]

8. Problems posed by the encounter with Socrates:
   • how can this world be only apparent?
   • how can we explain the glimpses of & clues to goodness that we encounter in this world?
   • how can Socrates' followers (especially Plato) avoid a debilitating quietism?

revised September 23, 1996


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