Remembering Socrates Philosophical Essays Edited by LINDSAY JUDSON and VASSILIS KARASMANIS CLARENDON PRESS Á OXFORD 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß the several contributors 2006 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0-19-927613-7 978-0-19-927613-4 13579108642 Contents Notes on Contributors and Editors vii Introduction 1 1. Socrates’ Dialectic in Xenophon’s Memorabilia 3 Carlo Natali 2. If you Know What is Best, you Do it: Socratic Intellectualism in Xenophon and Plato 20 Gerhard Seel 3. Socrates and Hedonism 50 Charles H. Kahn 4. Socrates and Euthyphro: The Argument and its Revival 58 Terence Irwin 5. Did Socrates Agree to Obey the Laws of Athens? 72 Lesley Brown 6. Aporia and Searching in the Early Plato 88 Vasilis Politis 7. Types of DeWnition in the Meno 110 David Charles 8. DeWnition in Plato’s Meno 129 Vassilis Karasmanis 9. Sharing a Property 142 Theodore Scaltsas 10. Socrates the Sophist 157 C. C. W. Taylor 11. Arcesilaus: Socratic and Sceptic 169 John M. Cooper 12. The Early Christian Reception of Socrates 188 Michael Frede Index 203 Notes on the Contributors and Editors Lesley Brown is Centenary Fellow in Philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford, and the author of numerous articles and book chapters on Plato and Aristotle. David Charles is Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Oriel College, Oxford. He is the author of Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action (London, 1984), Aristotle on Meaning and Essence (Oxford, 2000), and a variety of articles on topics in ancient and contemporary philosophy. John M. Cooper is Stuart Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Program in Classical Philosophy at Princeton University. His books include Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1975), Seneca: Moral and Political Essays (co-edited with J. F. Procope´, Cambridge, 1995), Plato: Complete Works (edited with D.S. Hutchinson, Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1997), Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory (Princeton, 1999), and Knowledge, Nature, and the Good: Essays on Ancient Philosophy (Princeton, 2004). Michael Frede is Emeritus Professor of the History of Philosophy, Oxford University. His publications include Galen: Three Treatises on the Nature of Science (with Richard Walzer, Indianapolis, 1985), Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Oxford, 1987), Aristoteles Metaphysik Z (with Gu¨nther Patzig, Munich, 1988), and The Original Sceptics: A Controversy (with Myles Burnyeat, In- dianapolis and Cambridge, 1997). Terence Irwin is Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters, Cornell University. His books include Aristotle’s First Principles (Oxford, 1988), Classical Thought (Oxford, 1989), Plato’s Ethics (Oxford, 1995), and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (2nd edn, Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1999). Lindsay Judson is Official Student and Tutor in Philosophy, Christ Church, Oxford. He is the author of a variety of articles on ancient philosophy, and is the Editor of the Clarendon Aristotle Series and Co-editor (with Julia Annas) of Oxford Aristotle Studies. Charles H. Kahn is Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Anaximander and the Origins of Greek Cosmology (New York, 1960), The Art and Thought of Heraclitus (Cambridge, 1979), Plato and the Socratic Dialogue (Cambridge, 1996), and Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 2001), The Verb ‘Be’ in Ancient Greek (2nd edn, Indianapolis and Cambridge, 2002). Vassilis Karasmanis is Professor of Philosophy, Technical University of Athens. He is the author of numerous articles on ancient philosophy and ancient mathematics. He was Director of the European Cultural Centre of Delphi from 1994 to 2004. viii Notes on the Contributors and Editors Carlo Natali is Professor of Philosophy, Universita’di Venezia. His books include The Wisdom of Aristotle (Albany, 2001), L’action efficace. Etudes de la the´orie de l’action d’Aristote (Louvain-la-Neuve, 2004), and Aristotle’s Life and the Or- ganisation of his School (Princeton, 2006). He is Co-editor (with Lloyd Gerson and Gerhard Seel) of International Aristotle Studies. Vasilis Politis is Lecturer in Philosophy, Trinity College, Dublin. His publica- tions include Aristotle and the Metaphysics (London, 2004) and a translation of Paul Natorp, Plato’s Theory of Ideas (with John Connolly, Berlin, 2004). Theodore Scaltsas is Professor of Ancient Philosophy, University of Edinburgh. His books include Substances and Universals in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Ithaca, 1994) and Unity, Identity and Explanation in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (co-edited with David Charles and Mary Louise Gill, Oxford, 1994). His most recent publications are on the topics of plural subjects, relations, and ontological composition. He is the Director of Project Archelogos. Gerhard Seel is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Philosophy, University of Bern. His publications include Sartres Dialektik (Bonn 1971), Die Aristotelische Modaltheorie (Berlin and New York, 1982), and Ammonius and the Sea Battle (with J-P. Schneider and D. Schulthess, Berlin, 2001). He is Secretary General of the International Academy for Philosophy of Art and Co-editor (with Lloyd Gerson and Carlo Natali) of International Aristotle Studies. C. C. W. Taylor is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Oxford University, and an Emeritus Fellow of Corpus Christi College. He is author of The Greeks on Pleasure (with J. C. B. Gosling, Oxford, 1982), Plato, Protagoras (2nd edn, Oxford, 1991), Socrates (Oxford, 1998), and The Atomists: Leucippus and Democritus (Toronto, 1999). He was Editor of Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy from 1993 to 1998. Introduction Socrates died in Athens in 399 bc by drinking hemlock, condemned to death by his fellow citizens. In 2001 the European Cultural Centre of Delphi, with the support of the Greek Ministry of Culture, organized a number of activities and events to commemorate the 2,400th anniversary of Socrates’ death. One of these was an international conference on Socrates, held in Athens and Delphi: in this volume, with the permission of the European Cultural Centre of Delphi, we publish some of the papers presented at this conference. For the selection of the papers the editors were assisted by David Charles and Michael Frede. The essays in this collection pursue in various ways Socrates’ most famous saying ‘The unexamined life is not a life worth living for a human being’ (Apology 38a). One theme is Socrates’ own methods of examination. Socrates enquires by question and answer, argument and counterargument, with a variety of inter- locutors, an approach which some writers called ‘dialectic’, and which had among its oVspring Platonic and Aristotelian dialectic. Carlo Natali discusses Socratic dialectic as portrayed by Xenophon. Vasilis Politis focuses on another key ingredient of Socrates’ examinations—aporia, puzzlement—in which some of Socrates’ conversations begin and many end. Socrates linked the idea of the examined life to the good life in at least two ways. First, his enquiries often focus on the need to arrive at deWnitions of notions central to living well, such as courage, piety, or friendship: David Charles and Vassilis Karasmanis explore the development of this idea of deWnition in Plato’s Meno. Second, Socrates em- braced the idea that coming to know the truth about living well—enquiries of the type he engaged in being one, if not the only, way to achieve this—was enough to guarantee that one did indeed live well. Gerhard Seel and Charles Kahn explore diVerent aspects of this diYcult and challenging doctrine. Three further papers are concerned with particular sets of arguments in Platonic dialogues. Terence Irwin and Lesley Brown consider famous and much-discussed arguments asso- ciated with Socrates’ trial and execution, in Plato’s Euthyphro and Crito respect- ively, while Theodore Scaltsas looks at a more neglected