Gregory Vlastos, Socrates
72 Gregory Vlastos, Socrates: Ironist and ~oral Philosopher (Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ISBN 0 521 307333 hardback £35/$57-50; ISB~ 0 521 31450X paperback £11-95/S16-95. Socrates: Ironist and Noral Philosopher (SINP) is a book that all students of Socrates and of Greek philosophy will have to read, and will benefit from reading. It isn't the complete portrait of Socrates that many of us hoped it would be (for example, it contains no full discussion of the elenchus) and it is not all new much of it is already familiar from journal articles. It reads, indeed, more like a collection of articles than a unified book, but it is none the less engaging and provocative for that, the product of hard thinking by a major scholar and a life-long Socratist It is also very well written. I shall focus on only a few central themes. 1. Socrates and Plato Vlastos (pp. 46-7) divides the Platonic dialogues into four classes: (1) ELENCTIC; Apology, Charmides, Crico, Euthyphro, Gorgias, Hippias Ninor, Ion, Laches, Protagoras, Republic I (2) TRANSITIONAL: Eu thydemus, Hippias l1ajor, Lysis, l1enexenus, l1eno (3) MIDDLE: Cratylus, Phaedo, Symposium, Republic II-X, Phaedrus, Parmenides, Theaetetus (4) LATE: Timaeus, Crit ias, Sophist, Politicus, Philebus, Laws 73 He believes that the protagonist of the elenctic dialogues ("SocratesE") is the historical Socrates. while the protagonist of the middle and later dialogues ("SocratesM") is little more than a mouthpiece for Plato. Many scholars would go along with this thesis. but they might well balk at the members of (2).
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