Christopher Moore

Socrates does not use the Laws' Speech in the Crito principally to persuade Crito to accept his coming execution. It is used instead to persuade Crito to examine and work on his inadequate view of justice. Crito's view of justice fails to coordinate one's duties to friends and those to the law. The Laws' Speech accomplishes this persuasive goal by accompanying Crito’s earlier speech. Both start from the same view of justice, one that Crito accepts, but reach opposing conclusions. Crito cannot judge between the two appealing speeches. His understanding of justice is too confused for him to decide well how to help Socrates. His need to explain what happened the morning he visited Socrates will prompt him and others to examine this indeterminate view of justice. Socrates foregoes direct refutation because Crito will not abide that usual way of interrogation. Engaging in short question-and-answer conversation is not the only way to bring a person to aporia and the intention to examine oneself. Socrates does not here undermine his assertions in the Apology about his ignorance, lack of interest in teaching, constant philosophizing, and his belief that what he does is question, examine, and test those he talks to.

We argue that friendship is constituted in the practice of narration, not merely identifi ed through psychological or sociological criteria. We show that whether two people have, as Aristotle argues, ‘lived together’ in ‘mutually acknowledged goodwill’ can be determined only through a narrative reconstruction of a shared past. We demonstrate this with a close reading of Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A Friendship (1982). We argue that this book provides not only an illustration but also an enactment of the practice of friendship as the urge to redeem—and thus to instantiate—Aristotelian suzên (‘living together’) by means of its telling.

In his second question of thePhaedrus, Socrates asks Phaedrus how he spent (διατριβή) his morning with Lysias. Phaedrus answers: ‘You'll learn, should you have the leisure (σχολή) to walk and listen.’ Socrates responds:What? Don't you think I would judge it, as Pindar puts it, a thing ‘surpassing even lack of leisure’ (καὶ ἀσχολίας ὑπέρτερον), to hear how you and Lysias spent your time? (227b6–10)Socrates quotes fromFirst Isthmian2. In this victory ode, Pindar celebrates, uniquely in his extant oeuvre, a charioteer winner who has driven his own team. The epinician poem and the dialogue, especially the myth in Socrates’ second speech, have remarkable systematic parallels. This suggests that Pindar's victor serves as model for the palinode's philosophical lover, and Pindar's song for Socrates’ conversation.

Socrates’ second speech in the Phaedrus includes the argument (245c6–246a2) that starts “all/every soul is immortal” (“ψυχὴ πᾶσα ἀθάνατος”).1 This argument has attracted attention for its austerity and placement in Socrates’ grand speech about chariots and love. Yet it has never been identified as a deliberately fallacious argument.2 This article argues that it is. Socrates intends to confront his interlocutor Phaedrus with a dubious sequence of reasoning. He does so to show his speech-loving friend how—rather than simply to tell him that—analytic as much as imagistic speech can persuade without deserving conviction.It has been shown in recent years that on four other occasions Socrates deliberately utters bad ..

When Socrates says, for the only time in the Socratic literature, that he strives to “know himself” (Phdr. 229e), he does not what this “self” is, or how he is to know it. Recent scholarship is split between taking it as one’s concrete personality and as the nature of (human) souls in general. This paper turns for answers to the immediate context of Socrates’ remark about selfknowledge: his long diatribe about myth-rectification. It argues that the latter, a civic task that Socrates’ dismisses as too laborious, nevertheless serves as a model for the more personal former task. Both involve piecemeal acknowledgement and adjustment of one’s commitments for the sake of living successfully. Both require looking simultaneously to general facts about people (or the world) and to particular facts about oneself (or one’s city). Socrates’ hope that he differs from Typhon (230a) means that he hopes he is amenable to rectification.

This article argues that Aristophanes'Cloudstreats Socrates as distinctly interested in promoting self-knowledge of the sort related to self-improvement. Section I shows that Aristophanes links the precept γνῶθι σαυτόν with Socrates. Section II outlines the meaning of that precept for Socrates. Section III describes Socrates' conversational method in theCloudsas aimed at therapeutic self-revelation. Section IV identifies the patron Cloud deities of Socrates' school as also concerned to bring people to a therapeutic self-understanding, albeit in a different register from that of Socrates. Section V discusses a sequence of jokes connected to ‘stripping’ that give a concrete image to the search for self-knowledge. Both the action of the Clouds and the tales of cloak-stripping provide models for understanding self-knowledge in a Socratic key. Section VI argues that Socrates' other interest in thephrontistērion, myth-rationalization, is consistent with the promotion of self-knowledge. Section VII supports the claim that Plato'sPhaedrusalludes constantly to theClouds, and because thePhaedruspays careful attention to self-knowledge, Plato must think that theCloudsdoes too. It notes in particular that we can explain the Platonic Socrates' famous self-knowledge-related curiosity about his similarity to Typhon as Plato's allusion to Aristophanes, an allusion made apt by Aristophanes' coordination of Socrates with self-knowledge. Section VIII concludes the paper.

Among our earliest extant references to the word ‘philosophize’ is an unfamiliar one, from the mythographer Herodorus of Pontic Heraclea, whose son Bryson associated with Plato and Aristotle. A Byzantine compiler quotes Herodorus, probably from his book on Heracles, as saying that his hero ‘philosophized until death’. This is a surprising claim in light of the fifth/fourth-centuryb.c.view of Heracles as long-toiling but not intellectual. Euripides'Licymniuscharacterizes him as ‘unimpressive and unadorned, good to the greatest degree, confined from allsophiain action, unversed in talking’. Heracles is thus explicitly distinguished from those who strive for dialectical understanding or theoretical knowledge.

Aristotle uses philosophia (and philosophos, philosophein, philosophôs, sumphilosophein, philosophêteon) in at least ten senses across his oeuvre, as this first study of every instance in his writings reveals. Irrespective of the specific approaches of its practitioners, philosophia may be, for example, an exercise of cleverness; or leisurely study; or the desire to know; or the pursuit of fundamental explanation; or a historically extended discipline. This variety allows us to go some way in reconstructing the complex attitude Aristotle had toward a culturally specific practice in which he located himself and soon helped develop into a specialized discipline. Another benefit is that it allows us to clarify the argumentative method in his Protrepticus, which depends on several senses of philosophia. It also puts up obstacles to determining whether, for example, Aristotle believes philosophia is an epistêmê.

This paper argues that Socrates’s baffling digression on Spartan philosophy, just before he interprets Simonides’s ode, gives a key to the whole of Plato’s Protagoras. It undermines simple distinctions between competition and cooperation in philosophy, and thus in the discussions throughout the dialogue. It also prepares for Socrates’s interpretation of Simonides’s ode as a questionable critique of Pittacus’s sage wisdom “Hard it is to be good.” This critique stands as a figure for the dialogue’s contrast between Protagoras’s and Socrates’s pedagogical methods. Protagoras advances an emulative view of education against Socrates’s self-knowledge model. The paper concludes with some thoughts on Protagoras’s claim that talking about poetry is as much about virtue as the earlier back-and-forth exchange about virtue’s unity and teachability.

The Greeks knew a virtue term that represented the ability to determine which norms deserved commitment, a virtue term usually misunderstood as “prediction of likely outcomes” or “being hesitant”:promêtheia. Plato’s uses of this term, almost completely ignored by scholarship, show a sensitivity to the prerequisites for the capacity for rational agency. We must add this virtue term to the usual suspects related to acting as a rational agent:sôphrosunê, dikaiosunê, phrônesis, andsophia.Promêtheiastands out for its importance in times of ignorance of the future.

In this book, the first systematic study of Socrates' reflections on self-knowledge, Christopher Moore examines the ancient precept 'Know yourself' and, drawing on Plato, Aristophanes, Xenophon, and others, reconstructs and reassesses the arguments about self-examination, personal ideals, and moral maturity at the heart of the Socratic project. What has been thought to be a purely epistemological or metaphysical inquiry turns out to be deeply ethical, intellectual, and social. Knowing yourself is more than attending to your beliefs, discerning the structure of your soul, or recognizing your ignorance - it is constituting yourself as a self who can be guided by knowledge toward the good life. This is neither a wholly introspective nor a completely isolated pursuit: we know and constitute ourselves best through dialogue with friends and critics. This rich and original study will be of interest to researchers in the philosophy of Socrates, selfhood, and ancient thought.

An original and provocative book that illuminates the origins of philosophy in ancient Greece by revealing the surprising early meanings of the word "philosopher" Calling Philosophers Names provides a groundbreaking account of the origins of the term philosophos or "philosopher" in ancient Greece. Tracing the evolution of the word's meaning over its first two centuries, Christopher Moore shows how it first referred to aspiring political sages and advice-givers, then to avid conversationalists about virtue, and finally to investigators who focused on the scope and conditions of those conversations. Questioning the familiar view that philosophers from the beginning "loved wisdom" or merely "cultivated their intellect," Moore shows that they were instead mocked as laughably unrealistic for thinking that their incessant talking and study would earn them social status or political and moral authority. Taking a new approach to the history of early Greek philosophy, Calling Philosophers Names seeks to understand who were called philosophoi or "philosophers" and why, and how the use of and reflections on the word contributed to the rise of a discipline. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, the book demonstrates that a word that began in part as a wry reference to a far-flung political bloc came, hardly a century later, to mean a life of determined self-improvement based on research, reflection, and deliberation. Early philosophy dedicated itself to justifying its own dubious-seeming enterprise. And this original impulse to seek legitimacy holds novel implications for understanding the history of the discipline and its influence.

The Phaedrus depicts the Platonic Socrates’ most explicit exhortation to ‘philosophy’. The dialogue thereby reveals something of his idea of its nature. Unfortunately, what it reveals has been obscured by two habits in the scholarship: to ignore the remarks Socrates makes about ‘philosophy’ that do not arise in the ‘Palinode’; and to treat many of those remarks as parodies of Isocrates’ competing definition of the term. I remove these obscurities by addressing all fourteen remarks about ‘philosophy’ and by showing that for none do we have reason to attribute to them Isocratean meaning. We thereby learn that ‘philosophy’ does not refer essentially to contemplation of the forms but to conversation concerned with selfimprovement and the pursuit of truth.

Sôphrosunê ("self-discipline") is the often-forgotten sibling of justice, wisdom, courage, and piety in discussions of canonical Greek virtues. Christopher Moore shows that during the classical period it was the object of significant debate--about its scope, its feel, its practical manifestations, and its value. By interpreting sôphrosunê as a commitment to norm-following, we see that these pointed discussions of the virtue, previously ignored as parodic moralizing or expressions of political propaganda, are in fact concerned with the ideal of human agency. These discussions query the way we become fully responsible for our actions. Greek thinking about sôphrosunê becomes thinking about self-constitution, our crucial capacity to act on the general reasons that we come to identify with as our own. This perspective explains sôphrosunê's inclusion in Plato's canon of virtues, and before that its frequent appearance in funerary inscriptions, elegiac poetry, tragic drama, and historiography. It also explains the analytic attention given to it by Heraclitus, the Sophists, the historians, Socrates, Xenophon, and Plato. Moore deals principally with the classical period, though the book includes one chapter addressing earlier poetry and another addressing the virtue in two gender-sensitive post-classical works. An appendix deals with the epigraphic material. For the Greeks (and perhaps for us) there is a virtue of agency, an acquirable capacity to be guided by what's best. Hardly just a concern for reticence and reserve, commitment to sôphrosunê is a commitment to whatever it is that makes us truly ourselves.