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Spring 2016 Volume 42 Issue 3 Spring 2016 Volume 42 Issue 3 341 David Foster Holbein and Plato on the Quadrivium 367 Nelson Lund A Woman’s Laws and a Man’s: Eros and Thumos in Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Heloise (1761) and The Deer Hunter (1978) 437 Thomas L. Pangle Socrates’s Argument for the Superiority of the Life Dedicated to Politics Review Essays: 463 Liu Xiaofeng How Philosophy Became Socratic: A Study of Plato’s “Protagoras,” “Charmides,” and “Republic” by Laurence Lampert 477 Matthew Post The Meanings of Rights: The Philosophy and Social Theory of Rights, ed. Costas Douzinas and Conor Gearty; Libertarian Philosophy in the Real World: The Politics of Natural Rights by Mark D. Friedman; The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism by Steven Wall An Exchange: 495 Tucker Landy Reply to Antoine Pageau St.-Hilaire’s Review of After Leo Strauss: New Directions in Platonic Political Philosophy 497 Antoine P. St-Hilaire Strauss’s Platonism and the Fate of Metaphysics: A Rejoinder to Tucker Landy’s Reply Book Reviews: 501 Rodrigo Chacón Arendtian Constitutionalism: Law, Politics and the Order of Freedom by Christian Volk 507 Ross J. Corbett Scripture and Law in the Dead Sea Scrolls by Alex P. Jassen 513 Bernard J. Dobski On Sovereignty and other Political Delusions by Joan Cocks; Freedom Beyond Sovereignty: Reconstructing Liberal Individualism by Sharon Krause 521 Lewis Fallis On Plato’s “Euthyphro” by Ronna Burger 525 Hannes Kerber Political Philosophy: What It Is and Why It Matters by Ronald Beiner 531 Pavlos Leonidas Western Civilization and the Academy by Bradley C. S. Watson Papadopoulos 543 Antonio Sosa Democracy in Decline? by Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner 551 Dana Jalbert Stauffer Making Religion Safe for Democracy: Transformation from Hobbes to Tocqueville by J. Judd Owen 557 John B. Tieder Jr. The First American Founder: Roger Williams and Freedom of Conscience by Alan E. Johnson 563 Shawn Welnak The Political Is Political: Conformity and the Illusion of Dissent in Contemporary Political Philosophy by Lorna Finlayson ©2016 Interpretation, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of the contents may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. ISSN 0020-9635 Editor-in-Chief Timothy W. Burns, Baylor University General Editors Charles E. Butterworth • Timothy W. Burns General Editors (Late) Howard B. White (d. 1974) • Robert Horwitz (d. 1987) Seth G. Benardete (d. 2001) • Leonard Grey (d. 2009) • Hilail Gildin (d. 2015) Consulting Editors Christopher Bruell • David Lowenthal • Harvey C. Mansfield • Thomas L. Pangle • Ellis Sandoz • Kenneth W. Thompson Consulting Editors (Late) Leo Strauss (d. 1973) • Arnaldo Momigliano (d. 1987) • Michael Oakeshott (d. 1990) • John Hallowell (d. 1992) • Ernest L. Fortin (d. 2002) • Muhsin Mahdi (d. 2007) • Joseph Cropsey (d. 2012) • Harry V. Jaffa (d. 2015) International Editors Terence E. Marshall • Heinrich Meier Editors Peter Ahrensdorf • Wayne Ambler • Marco Andreacchio • Maurice Auerbach • Robert Bartlett • Fred Baumann • Eric Buzzetti • Susan Collins • Patrick Coby • Erik Dempsey • Elizabeth C’de Baca Eastman • Edward J. Erler • Maureen Feder-Marcus • Robert Goldberg • L. Joseph Hebert • Pamela K. Jensen • Hannes Kerber • Mark J. Lutz • Daniel Ian Mark • Ken Masugi • Carol L. McNamara • Will Morrisey • Amy Nendza • Charles T. Rubin • Leslie G. Rubin • Thomas Schneider • Susan Meld Shell • Geoffrey T. Sigalet • Nicholas Starr • Devin Stauffer • Bradford P. Wilson • Cameron Wybrow • Martin D. Yaffe • Catherine H. Zuckert • Michael P. Zuckert Copy Editor Les Harris Designer Sarah Teutschel Inquiries Interpretation, A Journal of Political Philosophy Department of Political Science Baylor University 1 Bear Place, 97276 Waco, TX 76798 email [email protected] Book Review: On Plato’s “Euthyphro” 521 Ronna Burger, On Plato’s “Euthyphro.” Munich: Carl Friedrich von Siemens Stiftung, 2015, 124 pp. The Divine, the Holy, and the Just Lewis Fallis Harvard University [email protected] On Plato’s “Euthyphro” presents a more thoughtful and careful analysis of the dialogue than any previous full-length commentary. Ronna Burger argues con- vincingly that the Euthyphro should be read as a Platonic defense of Socrates against the accusations made by Aristophanes in the Clouds (15). In that comedy, Socrates is presented as a threat to the authority of the fathers and to traditional piety. In Plato’s dialectical comedy, Socrates is presented as “the defender of the fathers and the practices of piety in the city” (113). To be such a defender, Socrates must moderate the fanaticism of Euthyphro, a young diviner who is attempting to prosecute his own father for murder. By the final exchange in the dialogue, “Euthyphro has been moved from his boastful identification with a punishing god to acceptance of the public practices that foster in the family and the city recognition of limits, sanctioned by higher powers” (103–5). Socrates’s primary motive in speaking with Euthyphro, then, seems to be philanthropy. The inclusion of a number of references to other works is both a strength and a weakness of the commentary. Burger refers to works by Aristophanes, Augustine, Cicero, Halevi, Herodotus, Hesiod, Isocrates, Kierkegaard, Maimonides, Nietzsche, Strauss, and Thucydides, as well as to a number of Platonic dialogues. Often these references are very helpful in casting new light on the Euthyphro, as when Burger compares Euthyphro to Abraham in order to illustrate two modes or aspects of piety (67–69). (In the first mode, © 2016 Interpretation, Inc. 522 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 42 / Issue 3 when he attempts to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham accepts God’s will as disposi- tive and obeys without questioning. In the second mode, when he negotiates with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham subjects even the will of God to a standard, a standard that seems to him knowable by the unassisted human mind; he attempts to bring God, as he experiences Him, into conformity with the standard he somehow knows even God must obey or respect.) But at times, the references to other works seem extraneous and distract attention from the dialogue, as when Euthyphro’s father’s treatment of Euthyphro’s laborer—taking the laborer to be a “stand-in” for Euthyphro himself—is linked to Oedipus’s father’s treatment of Oedipus (31). One wishes that certain connections were either elaborated more fully, or ignored in order to enable a tighter focus on the puzzles of the dialogue. One of the great virtues of the commentary is the sustained emphasis it puts on a pair of crucial questions: how is the divine related to the holy (35, 67), and how is the holy related to the just (75, 87)? This emphasis, along with the thoughtfulness with which Burger has clearly considered these questions, sets the commentary apart. Yet it seems to me that her answers to these ques- tions, answers which are to some degree stated and to some degree implied, are not entirely satisfying; I will try to explain why. Euthyphro is ambivalent with regard to the relationship between the divine and the holy. Specifically, he is ambivalent as to whether divine love causes the quality of holiness or the quality of holiness causes divine love. In discussing his ambivalence, scholars typically assume that Euthyphro must choose between two options which they treat as mutually exclusive: either divine love can cause the quality of holiness, or the holy can be tethered to a fixed standard. Burger transcends this assumption. According to her “dynamic account” of the holy, the just causes divine love, and divine love causes the quality of holiness. As she puts it, “the holy is a product of the gods’ approval, but that approval is itself elicited by the gods’ recognition of an intrinsic property, more specifically, the just” (87, cf. 59 and 73–77). This innovative account clarifies the relationship between the divine and the holy, and between the holy and the just, while retaining both of the things which Euthyphro seems to want: the holy can be both tethered to a fixed standard and determined by divine love. A potential problem with the dynamic account is that Euthyphro, the believer, does not seem to accept it. Instead, when pushed to decide whether divine love is determinative of or determined by the quality of holiness, he chooses the latter: the gods love the holy because it is holy (10d5). While Book Review: On Plato’s “Euthyphro” 523 noting that Euthyphro does not accept the dynamic account, Burger claims that Socrates and Plato would accept it. She justifies this claim mainly on the basis of a purported ambiguity in a response by Euthyphro. When asked whether the gods love the holy “on account of this [touto], that it is holy, or on account of something else/for some other reason?” Euthyphro answers, “No, but because of this [touto]” (10d4–5). According to Burger, this response is ambiguous, since “his words more naturally refer to the last thing said— ‘some other reason’ why the gods love what is holy” (71). But it seems odd to attribute a complex theory to Socrates and Plato on the basis of an ambiguous response by Euthyphro. Although Socrates has led Euthyphro to agree that the gods love what they find noble and good and just (59), there does not seem to be textual warrant for claiming that the dynamic account as a whole is a theological reform that was “suggested” or “implied” by Socrates (87). While the account has the advantage of resolving the ambivalence or tension within Euthyphro’s understanding, it might be more fruitful to analyze that tension on its own terms, rather than to relieve Euthyphro too quickly in his distress. But should we care what Euthyphro thinks about the divine and the holy? Did Socrates care? We are led back to the question of Socrates’s motive in speak- ing with Euthyphro.
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