Book Notes

Plato and

CHRISTOPHER ROWE

Simon Slings’s : 1 has an introduction of 234 pages, a new text with facing translation (pp. 240-59), 72 pages of commentary (in a smaller font), two short appendixes, bibliography and indexes. It is a fuller treatment than this tiny text has ever received, and probably will ever receive; some might say that it also fuller than the Clitophon deserves, but if they did, they might well change their mind afterinspecting the volume itself, which covers amultiplicity of issues whether grammatical, syntactical, historical, philosophical, or more generally interpretative in meticulous detail, providing a mass of material that will bene t (or at any rate interest) anyone working on the Platonic corpus and/or fourth cen- tury Greek literature. The Commentary in Plato: Clitophon is not quite, as its dust-jacket claims, ‘the rst ever to be published in English’: the volume as a whole is still, as Slings says, recognizable as A Commentary on the Platonic Clitophon , his doctoral dis- sertation, privately published in 1981 (he generously sent me my copy years ago, in response to a letter out of the blue). One of the major di erences is obvious from the change of title: ‘... I now feel that the grounds for my doubts [about the authenticity of the Clitophon] are rather weak, and I have no compunction in presenting this revised version as Plato: Clitophon ’ (pp. x-xi). 2 But Slings is at

1 S.R. Slings, Plato,Clitophon. Edited with Intr oduction,Tra nslationa ndComment- ary by S.R.S. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999 (Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 37). pp. xv + 360. Hardback: 45.00. ISBN 0-521-63268-5. 2 Is there perhaps here a trace of the kind of process of reconversion described by Ernst Heitsch, at the end of his discussion of the peculiarities of the Hippias Ma jor (Grenzen philologischer Echtheitskritik. Bemerkungen zum ‘Grossen Hippias’, Akade- mie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz (Abhandlungen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse, 1999/ 4), Franz Steiner, Stuttgar t, 1999. pp. 40. Paperback: DM 27, . ISSN 0002-2977; ISBN 3-515-07517-8.): ‘ [w]er jeden dieser “Anstösse” isoliert und ihn da nn nach bewährter Methode mit Hilfe der Frage “Warum sollte Platon denn nicht. ..” unschädlich macht, mag glauben, er brauche sich in seiner Vermutung, der “ Gr. Hip.” sei ein Werk Platons, nicht beirren zu lassen’ (p. 40)? Slings discovers rather more strange things in the Clitophon, page for page, than does Heitsch in the Hippias Ma jor , but dismisses them one by one as evidence (i.e. against inauthenticity); Heitsch, for his part, is inclined to nd a single untypical use of Žlla g‹r decisive. (At the other end of the spectrum, there seems now to be

2000 Phronesis X LV/2 160 BOOK NOTES pains to emphasize that the question of authenticity is less important than that of the ‘literary and philosophical intention’ of the work: that is, even if he is wrong in thinking (‘I still cannot shake o all my misgivings’) that it is by Plato, still his thesis so he claims about what the Clitophon is for would be untouched. Given that thesis, the chances that anyone except Plato could have written it are perhaps rather small (see esp. II.7.3 (1)). On Slings’s account, the Clitophon is an essentially parodic attack on the genre of explicit philosophical protreptic, an attack which simultaneously defends implicit protreptic, as represented above all by the kind of aporetic / maieutic / elenctic approach typical of Platonic writ- ing3 (and by no means restricted to the early works); if it also draws on the Platonic corpus, especially I, Apology, and Euthydemus, that is in the case of the rst e.g. because the author wants to suggest that ‘the only answer to Clitophon’s criticism is implicit protreptic as used in the Platonic dialogue’ (p. 125), or, in the case of the others, because they themselves for special rea- sons contain passages that properly belong to the ‘protreptic corpus’, and include what may be called ‘protreptic motifs’ ( p. 124). Clitophon’s attack is not directed at Plato, or at Plato’s Socrates (he makes it clear that he has absolutely no quar- rel with the basics of Socratic teaching); only at a certain literary Socrates. If one were to buy this general explanation of the Clitophon, and some subsidiary argu- ments about language, style, and manner of argument, then it looks a reasonable risk to suppose that its author was Plato. But should we buy Slings’s interpreta- a move in some quarters to welcome back alleged spuria almost on principle: cf. Jacob Howland, below.) 3 Gareth Matthews’ s short book on Socratic Per plexity and the Na ture of Philo- sophy provides a kind of history of the notion of aporia, or ‘philosophical perplexity’, from Socrates to (Gareth B. Matthews, Socratic Perplexity and the Nature of Philosophy, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1999. pp. 137. Hardback: 19.99. ISBN 0-19- 823828-2). It is a history, Matthews suggests, that will mirror the experience of many present-day philosophers: there is what one might call the genuine Socratic article, shared perplexity (marked by Socrates’ disclaimer of knowledge, radically misunder- stood by Vlastos and others: ‘ I don’ t know’ means ‘ unexpected di culties ahead’ ); then there is purely instrumental perplexity (making people perplexed for a purpose: cf. Meno); ‘ second-order’ perplexity ( perplexity about solutions to perplexities: cf. Parmenides); perplexity professionalized (as in the gure of the Socratic midwife in Theaetetus); and then perplexity targeted ( ), which takes us to Aristotle, who ‘tends to use aporia for the puzzles or di culties that might lead one to a state of perplexity, rather than for the state itself . ..’ (p. 109). The underlying claim of the book is probably that genuine perplexity is an essential part of the philosophica l process (not least because ‘ philosophy deals with inherently problematic concepts’ : p. 126). The point about the contrast between (Matthews’ s) Socrates and Aristotle is nicely taken, but overall the book gives a fairly familiar view of Plato, with many of the usual landmarks. The style of the volume, however, generally suggests that it is meant for intending philosophers, for whom it would make a readable introduction both to what philosophy might be about and to the study of the history of philosophy. (Cf. Matthews’ s related piece on ‘The career of perplexity in Plato’ in the 1997 BACAP volume (n. 53 below).)