Nicholas D. Smith

In his interrogation of Meletus in Plato’s version of Socrates’ defense speech, Socrates offers an interesting argument that promises to provide important evidence for his views about crime and punishment—if only we can understand how the argument is supposed to work. It is our project in this paper to do that. We argue that there are two main problems with the argument: one is that it is not obvious how to make the argument valid; the other is that the argument seems to rely on a distinction that Socrates himself rejects ––a distinction between voluntary and involuntary wrongdoing. Earlier discussions of the argument require Socrates to be using a premise here that he regards as false. In this paper, we argue that Socrates actually regards the critical premise as true, and thus we end up providing a significantly new interpretation of Socrates’ view that all wrongdoing is involuntary. We claim, that even this position must accommodate the idea that some people really do voluntary harm to others.

The Philosophy of Knowledge: A History presents the history of one of Western philosophy's greatest challenges: understanding the nature of knowledge. Divided chronologically into four volumes, it follows conceptions of knowledge that have been proposed, defended, replaced, and proposed anew by ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary philosophers. This volume covers the Presocratics, Sophists, and treatments of knowledge offered by Socrates and Plato. With original insights into the vast sweep of ways in which philosophers have sought to understand knowledge, The Philosophy of Knowledge: A History embraces what is vital and evolving within contemporary epistemology. Overseen by an international team of leading philosophers and featuring 50 specially-commissioned chapters, this is a major collection on one of philosophy's defining topics.

In the Protagoras, Socrates argues that each of the virtue-terms refers to one thing (: 333b4). But in the Laches (190c8–d5, 199e6–7), Socrates claims that courage is a proper part of virtue as a whole, and at Euthyphro 11e7–12e2, Socrates says that piety is a proper part of justice. But A cannot be both identical to B and also a proper part of B – piety cannot be both identical to justice and also a proper part of justice. In this paper we argue that coherent sense can be made of Socrates'' apparently conflicting claims. The key to understanding Socrates'' position, we will argue, is the central role of wisdom among the virtues. It is through the relationship of each virtue to wisdom that each may be said to be the same as all of the others, on the one hand, and also that some virtues may be regarded as proper parts of some other virtues, or as proper parts of virtue in general, on the other.

In this paper, we review Keith Lehrer’s account of the basing relation, with particular attention to the two cases he offered in support of his theory, Raco (Lehrer, Theory of knowledge, 1990; Theory of knowledge, (2nd ed.), 2000) and the earlier case of the superstitious lawyer (Lehrer, The Journal of Philosophy, 68, 311–313, 1971). We show that Lehrer’s examples succeed in making his case that beliefs need not be based on the evidence, in order to be justified. These cases show that it is the justification (rather than the belief) that must be based in the evidence. We compare Lehrer’s account of basing with some alternative accounts that have been offered, and show why Lehrer’s own account is more plausible.

In this article, I review the debates about Socratic metaphysics. In particular, I argue with Vlastos that talk about Forms in Plato’s early dialogues does not indicate the same view as what comes to be called the “theory of forms” in later dialogues. However, I also give very different reasons from those given by Vlastos or his critics for coming to this conclusion. I note that the virtue forms of the early dialogues have part-whole relationships, which cannot be found in the forms of the middle period. I also note that the virtue forms are identified with knowledge in the early dialogues, whereas in the middle period the forms are the objects of – but are not identical to – know­ledge.