Ravi Sharma

For more than 150 years, scholarship has largely discounted one of the main sources of evidence concerning the trial of Socrates. Scholars have held that most of the discussion of the charge of corrupting the youth in Xenophon’s Memorabilia (Book 1, ch. 2) is not in fact a response to the arguments made at trial by the prosecution. Instead, they have thought, Xenophon’s text rebuts an anti-Socratic tract by the rhetorician Polycrates, who was otherwise best known for his playfully contrarian works. Scholars have also presumed that a late text, Libanius’ Apology of Socrates, likewise responds to Polycrates and provides a resource for the reconstruction of his work. This paper examines the considerations that have been used since the 1850s to support those judgments, and it argues that the considerations are uniformly unreliable. The upshot as regards Mem. 1.2 is that Xenophon’s work provides us with precious information as to how the prosecution sought to fill out its indictment of Socrates with evidence of his corrupting influence.

It is a scholarly commonplace that we know next to nothing of the arguments made by the prosecutors at Socrates’ trial, in order to support the charges named in their indictment. This article contends that we are in a better position than has previously been appreciated. Specifically, the article reconstructs a form of argument that the prosecutors used to support the charge of corrupting the youth. It begins with a puzzling passage from Xenophon’s Memorabilia 1.2 dealing with Socrates’ citations of poetry, and it argues that valuable context is supplied by a much later work, the Apology of Socrates by Libanius of Antioch. The article then uses a further passage from Libanius’ Apology, in connection with Socratic writings of Xenophon and Plato, to provide a broader characterization of the prosecution’s strategy in attacking Socrates.

Plato's Hippias Minor has long been considered puzzling in its philosophical purpose, its characterization of Socrates, and its overall design. Departing from a tradition of scholarship that largely relegates the dialogue to the fringes of the Platonic corpus, this volume offers a fresh translation into English and a comprehensive re-evaluation of the dialogue's philosophical content and literary construction. Ravi Sharma argues that Hippias Minor contributes significantly to our understanding of Plato's conception of intentional action and that the dialogue's ideas form the basis for reflections in moral psychology that may be found elsewhere in the Platonic corpus. The portrait of Socrates in the dialogue is one of Plato's more subtle explorations of his epistemic complexity: Socrates is shown to be wedded to the arguments he makes despite understanding that they entail significant difficulties for the development of a broader theory of intentional action. The overall literary design of Hippias Minor is revealed to be fully appropriate to Plato as a writer of dialogue, a master of character-portrayal, and an innovative commentator on his intellectual and cultural milieu. The commentary engages expansively with the history of scholarship in the major linguistic and methodological traditions, supporting an interpretation of the dialogue that fully integrates its philosophical and literary dimensions, and that draws on neglected historical evidence concerning the sophist Hippias to explain Plato's portrayal of him. The volume also provides a fresh examination of the relationship of Hippias Minor to relevant works by Xenophon and Antisthenes, offering a case study of the literary and intellectual relationships among first-generation Socratic authors.

We examine the evidence from Xenophon’s Apology and Memorabilia bearing on the question whether Xenophon’s Socrates has knowledge of virtue and teaches what he knows to others. Scholars have typically thought that the texts are internally contradictory, affirming in some passages that Socrates knows what virtue is and professes to teach others, while denying in other passages that he is a knower or a teacher. In reviewing the evidence, we offer a way to reconcile the texts. The resulting picture, which denies knowledge of virtue to Socrates and foregrounds his lifelong commitment to inquiry, has deep affinities with Plato’s portrait of Socrates.

In a famous—and famously difficult—passage of Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates discusses his turn away from his youthful scientific inquiries, which were done after the fashion of some of the “pre-Socratic” thinkers, and toward the Theory of Forms. There is a long-standing debate among interpreters as to whether the Forms are meant to supply the foundation of a new theory of causal explanation or whether instead Socrates is abandoning any concern with causation and turning to theorizing of a new kind—metaphysical explanation (in some sense of the word ‘metaphysical’ that needs to be explained). Most modern interpreters think that Socrates is still concerned with causal explanation. I defend the minority view—famously championed, though to my mind inadequately, by Gregory Vlastos—that Socrates is in fact concerned with metaphysical explanation. Specifically, I argue, Socrates is interested in analyzing the truth-grounds for certain true statements. The reason he casts his metaphysical concerns as comparing favorably to his earlier causal ones is that he thinks the two can both be assessed in terms of some general constraints on what counts as an adequate explanation (aitia).

The paper examines a puzzling sequence of verb tenses at Phaedo 100b3-9. It rejects the idea, almost universal among commentators, that the puzzle is to be solved by construing the first verbal expression as if it were equivalent to a future. The paper then offers another solution and explores its implications for understanding the broader philosophical context of the passage. What emerges is that the new solution provides a valuable clue to figuring out what precisely Socrates has in mind when he speaks at 100b4 of the ‘mode of explanation’ with which he is presently engaged. Hence, the tightly focused linguistic discussion at the paper’s outset ultimately takes on a good deal of significance for the interpretation of this difficult but important section of the dialogue.

In discussing Gail Fine’s contribution, Sharma challenges the idea that the pseudo-Platonic Sisyphus can productively be interpreted using the philosophical devices of Plato’s Meno. Sharma then explores another approach to the Sisyphus, which involves reading the dialogue as an attack on the tendency to assimilate deliberation to theoretical inquiry and, relatedly, as an attempt to call attention to the practical skills that are uniquely involved in deliberation. Sharma ends by speculating that the dialogue was composed by a member of the school of Isocrates and was intended as a criticism of the intellectual orientation of Plato’s Academy.

There is a widely accepted view that one cannot reconstruct the views of the historical Socrates. The reason offered is that the two authors (Plato and Xenophon) whose literary works about Socrates have survived portray the intellectual commitments of character Socrates in fundamentally divergent ways. We challenge this by looking at one of the most fundamental of the supposed divergences—the idea that Plato’s Socrates rejects the common moral doctrine of helping friends and harming enemies while Xenophon’s Socrates openly endorses it. In a comprehensive review of the evidence from Xenophon, we argue that things are not as they have seemed to readers of Xenophon’s work, and that Xenophon’s Socrates does not endorse without qualification the idea of harming enemies. Indeed, he completely rejects cases of retaliatory harm (the very cases with which Plato’s Socrates is centrally concerned) and allows for harm only in certain cases of self-defense (e.g., in warfare). Plato’s Socrates and Xenophon’s are not at all as far apart as it has seemed.

Since the late nineteenth century, Xenophon’s portrayal of Socrates has often been dismissed as the work of a dullard who failed to understand Socrates and whose writings mainly consist of an incoherent assemblage of barely disguised borrowings from the other Socratic writers. We resist the traditional characterization of Xenophon by examining in detail one of the longest chapters from Xenophon’s main Socratic work. It portrays a protreptic conversation between Socrates and a talented young man named ‘Euthydemus’. Scholars typically hold that there is no unity to the conversation and that it shifts topics repeatedly in more or less random fashion. We argue that the conversation is carefully structured so as to bring out the relations among the main doctrines informing Socrates’ moral outlook, and that the chapter as a whole can thus be understood as a primer in Socrates’ moral philosophy. They key to appreciating the unity of the chapter is to grasp the idea of a connection between norms of justice and personal well-being—the very same connection that informed the argument of Plato’s Hippias Minor.

M.M. McCabe argues that in Plato’s Euthydemus, Dionysodorus and Euthydemus hold a view she calls ‘chopped logos’. Chopped logos implies that nothing said is false, or opposed to any other statement, or entailed by any other statement. We focus on a key piece of evidence for chopped logos, the argument concluding that there is no such thing as contradiction (285e9–286b6), and defend a competing interpretation. The argument in question, and the eristic exchanges as a whole, are simply examples of a dialectical game, a contest that is the verbal equivalent of physical competitions like wrestling or the pankration. The argument has no doctrinal significance and no deep connection with the other arguments of the dialogue. Its interest proves to be broadly methodological rather than doctrinal, a showpiece of eristic display.

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.

Are people at bottom motivated entirely by self-interest? Or do they act only sometimes out of self-interest, and sometimes for other reasons—say, to help out a friend for her own sake, with no expectation of being benefitted in return? Scholars have often thought they could discern in the works of classical Greek thinkers a commitment to psychological egoism, the thesis that one is motivated to act only by considerations of the expected benefits and harms that will accrue to oneself. For instance, a host of influential interpreters have taken Plato to be wedded to psychological egoism throughout his corpus. Often, the commitment is thought to run so deep that Plato rarely, if ever, manages to articulate it explicitly, let alone to examine it critically and defend it. That kind of approach obviously invites challenges, and lately there has been a small but growing resistance to the egoistic interpretation of Plato. The challenges are especially welcome given the general lack of support for psychological egoism in the present intellectual climate: egoistic readings have increasingly seemed to imply a crippling weakness in the Platonic system.