Suzanne Stern-Gillet

The paper, although polemical for the most part, also presents a substantive thesis. The polemical part is directed at the claim that the Platonic Socrates held that philosophy as a practice is to be devoted to the care of self and others, and that the expression of emotion is an important aspect of the philosophic life. To undermine that claim, counter-examples from the autobiographical narrative in the Phaedo and the speeches of Diotima and Alcibiades in the Symposium are brought in. Once analysed at the required depth, those passages show that, on the contrary, Plato’s Socrates remains consistently dispassionate both in his life, as he narrates it, and in the views he is made to express in the two dialogues. Rather than promoting self-expression, Socrates never ceased to warn us against misology.

Is scientific reasoning the standard of rationality? Can historical explanation be reduced to the scientific mode of reasoning? R.G. Collingwood answered both questions negatively. He further attempted to show that the types of justification used to account for moral actions are closely similar to historical explanations. His ethics has thus a strong historicist and relativistio flavour. Hie aim of my paper is to state Collingwood's ethical views and to show that the "ethical judgment", which inevitably relies on rules, cannot be equated with the "historical judgment".