Nicholas D. Smith

This handbook provides detailed philosophical analysis of the life and thought of Socrates across fifteen in-depth chapters. Each chapter engages with a central aspect of the rich tradition of Socratic studies and, after surveying the state of scholarship, points the way forward to new directions of interpretation. A leading team of scholars present dynamic readings of Socrates, extracted from the historical context of Plato's dialogues, covering elenchus, irony, ignorance, definitions, pedagogy, friendship, politics and the daemon. Building on these core Socratic topics, this edition includes new accounts of Socrates in the work of philosopher and historian, Xenophon, the comic playwright, Aristophanes, as well as important scholarship on topics such as emotions, the afterlife, motivational intellectualism and virtue intellectualism. Fully revised and updated, the Bloomsbury Handbook of Socrates elucidates the complex landscape of Socratic thought and interpretation.

The emphasis Socrates puts on caring and other conative psychological conditions in Plato’s Apology is striking insofar as Plato’s Socrates is generally represented as an intellectualist about motivation and virtue. One might expect, accordingly, the representations of good and bad behaviour in his speeches would be characterized more in cognitive than in conative terms. The argument of this paper is that we can better understand Socrates’ conception of moral psychology – and also his views about moral culpability – by attending carefully to the way he explains his side of the case in the Apology. Our argument shows that the attribution of motivational intellectualism to Socrates can be sustained, but not in the way scholars have historically understood it. We show that a different conception of how Socrates understood the relationship between conation and cognition is necessary.

“Ethics in Plato’s Early Dialogues” reviews the main features of the ethical thought given to Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues. These topics include: eudaimonism (and whether that entails a problematic kind of egoism), virtue intellectualism (the view that virtue is a kind of knowledge that is at least similar to craft) motivational intellectualism (the view that all human action follows whatever the agent thinks is in her best interest at the time of action, among all of the options of which she is aware at the time), and the connections that are made in these dialogues between virtue and happiness. Also discussed are the views expressed about how and why ethical agents go wrong.

In Book V of Plato’s _Republic_, Plato has Socrates distinguish between three distinct cognitive powers (_dunameis_): knowledge (_epistēmē_), opinion (_doxa_), and ignorance (_agnosia_). Powers, Socrates goes on to explain, are distinguished in virtue of what they are related to and what they accomplish (_eph hōi te esti kai hō apergazetai_ --477d1). In this section of the dialogue, the second of these two differentiae is not invoked again; instead, all of the distinctions Socrates makes here are made in terms of the different objects to which the powers are related. Knowledge, we are told, is related to what is (to on); ignorance is related to what is not (to mē on); opinion is related to what both is and is not.Scholars have attended almost entirely to the distinction between knowledge and opinion, and for good reason: It is clear that this distinction is the primary one that Plato wishes to explicate here, as it is in terms of this distinction that the important difference between the philosopher rulers and ordinary rulers will be drawn. The distinctions between knowledge and ignorance and opinion and ignorance are only very briefly mentioned, and ignorance itself remains almost wholly unexplained. This chapter discusses the role of ignorance in Plato’s epistemology. This chapter's analysis is novel in four ways: First, other scholars have attended almost exclusively to the roles assigned to knowledge and opinion in this passage, and have neglected to explain whether — and if so, how — their analyses could explicate what Plato has Socrates say about ignorance. Secondly, the chapter argues that we should not understand the ‘related to’ part of Plato’s analysis as an intensional one: cognitive powers are not ‘of’ or ‘about’ the objects to which they are related, as scholars have generally supposed. The relationship of the powers to objects, rather, is a nomological one. Thirdly, I argue that what is produced by the cognitive powers are what we would call conceptualizations (or conceptions) of the entities to which they are said to be related (_epi_). Finally, the chapter argues that the case of ignorance makes clear that the ‘is’ in Plato’s analysis of the relata of each cognitive power must be understood neither veridically (where ‘is’ means ‘is true’), nor existentially (where ‘is’ means ‘exists’), but predicatively (where ‘is’ means ‘is F,’ where F is the name of a Platonic Form).

One doesn’t have to labor to find expressions of the ubiquitous negative attitude ancient Greek male authors expressed about women. This view, however, was not shared by the Socratics, as this volume shows. Among the Socratics, Plato, especially in the Republic, gives extraordinary expression to the Socratic recognition of the moral, political, and intellectual capacities of women – so much so that one contemporary scholar has gone so far as to claim that “the Re­public proposes a revolutionary project for fourth century BC Athens” (Brisson 2012). Plato’s “revolution” has captured the attention of a great many scholars, many of whom have tried to answer the question, “Why?” Why did Plato so radi­cally cut against the ingrained prejudice and argue, as he does in Republic V, that “men and women are by nature the same with respect to guarding the city” (456a)? In this paper, we take up the question that has prompted so many schol­arly proposals. After a brief summary of Plato’s argument for his “revolutionary” proposal, we turn to the arguments some scholars have offered for supposing that Plato’s thoughts about women were entailed by some other philosophical or political commitment. We explain why we do not find such explanations entirely adequate. We then make our own proposal: Plato’s evaluation of the capacities of women to do what would be required of the guardians of the kallipolis was, at least to some degree, informed and motivated by what he regarded as actual ex­amples of especially talented and capable women.

This book encourages renewed attention by contemporary epistemologists to an area most of them overlook: ancient philosophy. Readers are invited to revisit writings by Plato, Aristotle, Pyrrho, and others, and to ask what new insights might be gained from those philosophical ancestors. Are there ideas, questions, or lines of thought that were present in some ancient philosophy and that have subsequently been overlooked? Are there contemporary epistemological ideas, questions, or lines of thought that can be deepened by gazing back upon some ancient philosophy? The answers are 'yes' and 'yes', according to this book's 13 chapters, written by philosophers seeking to enrich contemporary epistemology through engaging with ancient epistemology. Key features: Blends ancient epistemology with contemporary epistemology, each reciprocally enriching each. Conceptually sensitive chapters by scholars of ancient epistemology. Historically sensitive chapters by scholars of contemporary epistemology. Clearly written chapters, guiding readers at once through central elements both of ancient and of contemporary epistemology.

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.

Scholars have wrestled with the very troubling but also rather long passage in the Protagoras in which Socrates offers an interpretation of a poem by Simonides (339e-347a). On the one hand, the way in which Socrates develops his interpretation leads to an outcome that makes it look as if Socrates attributes distinctly Socratic views to the poet, which had led a number of scholars to conclude that, albeit in a rather strange way, Socrates is trying to do something philosophically serious in his interpretation. On the other hand, the “philosophically serious” approach must confront several features of the Socratic interpretation that seem anything but serious. Immediately after concluding his interpretation, Socrates contends that the entire enterprise of poetical interpretation is “no different from the second-rate drinking parties of the agora crowd” (347c3-5) and dismisses such a form of entertainment as “childish frivolities” (347d6). In this paper, I argue that Socrates is presented by Plato as (i) doing something philosophically significant in this passage, and also (ii) providing an interpretation of Simonides that would appear to any intelligent reader as both comical (in places) and far-fetched in its conclusions, and also (iii) believing that the interpretation of poetry is an example of “childish frivolity.” Indeed, I claim that it is the third of these claims—which, after all, is the conclusion Socrates himself reaches by the time he is done—that Plato’s Socrates wants most of all for us to accept.

In this paper, we defend Socratic studies as a research programme against several recent attacks, including at least one recently published in Polis. Critics have argued that the study of Socrates, based upon evidence mostly or entirely derived from some set of Plato’s dialogues, is sfounded upon faulty and indefensible historical or hermeneutical technique. We begin by identifying what we believe are the foundational principles of Socratic studies, as the field has been pursued in recent years, and we then show how the research programme that derives from accepting these principles is not defeated by any of the most common recent criticisms of it. Specifically, we argue that challenges to sorting Plato’s dialogues by date, more general challenges to historicist interpretations of Plato’s dialogues, as well as recent literary criticisms of Socratic studies all fail to undermine the research programme. We conclude with some thoughts about how and why Socratic studies has proved itself a valuable and fruitful research programme.

Philosophers’ appeals to the processes of natural selection that are adaptive in terms of survival provide an incomplete picture of what naturalists have available to them to make the sort of defense skeptics claim cannot be made. To supplement this picture, we provide evidence from what Darwin called “sexual selection” and also what others now call “social selection” to provide a more complete picture of why it is reasonable to suppose that evolution has supplied human beings and many other animals highly reliable and also veridical cognitive processes.

: In her recent paper, “How to Escape Indictment for Impiety: Teaching as Punishment in the Euthyphro,” G. Fay Edwards argues that if Socrates were to become Euthyphro’s student, this should count as the appropriate punishment for Socrates’ alleged crime. In this paper, we show that the interpretation Edwards has proposed conflicts with what Socrates has to say about the functional role of punishment in the Apology, and that the account Socrates gives in the Apology, properly understood, also provides the correct interpretation of what Socrates says in the Euthyphro about the role of instruction for wrongdoers.