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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,

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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). Why. they might ask. aren' t the

Euthydemus. Lysis. and Hippias l1ajor fully elenctic dialogues?

Vlastos' answer. most succinctly given in an Appendix to his paper "The Socratic Elenchus."1 is this: They aren' t elenct ic dialogues because they abandon "adversary argument as Socrates' method of philosophical investigation." because

"the theses which are seriously debated in these dialogues are not contested by the interlocutors; Socrates himself is both their author and critic· (p. 57; compare SIl1P p. 49).

But this answer presupposes that an elenchus must be adversative. that one cannot elenctically examine oneself. and this is a controversial presupposition. It conflicts. for example. with the following text from the Apology:

The god stationed me [in Athens] obliging me to live philosophizing and examining myself and others (exetazanta emautan kai tau al1ous). (2Be4-6)

I conclude that if we want to treat these dialogues as transitional rather than elenctic. we need to find a better reason for doing so than the one Vlastos gives us. (It should go without saying that this apparently small point about where to put (e. g.) the Lysis has significant consequences when one turns to the philosophically much more interesting

1 Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy Vol. 1 (1983) pp. 57-B.