Socrates and Philosophy in the Dialogues of Plato
Cambridge University Press, 3/10/2011
EAN 9780521190619, ISBN10: 0521190614
Hardcover, 310 pages, 22.8 x 15.2 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
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 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.
Acknowledgments
1. Opposed hypotheses about Plato's dialogues
2. Socrates in the Apology
3. Socrates in the digression of the Theaetetus
extraction by declaration
4. Socrates in the Republic, part I
speech and counter-speech
5. Socrates in the Republic, part II
philosophers, forms, Glaucon and Adeimantus
6. Socrates in the Phaedo
another persuasion assignment
7. Others' conceptions of philosophy in Euthydemus, Lovers, and Sophist
8. Socrates and Plato in Plato's dialogues
9. Socrates and philosophy
Bibliography.