Russell E. Jones

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.

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.

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.

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.

In the Phaedo, Socrates offers recommendations for living a philosophical life. We argue that those recommendations can be properly understood only in light of Socrates’ account of the soul’s true nature, considered separately from the body. Embodiment causes the soul to diverge from its proper end, the pursuit of knowledge. Bodily pleasures, pains, and desires divert the soul to other ends, distract its attention away from knowledge, and deceive it about what is true. Socrates’ recommended solutions to these obstacles are diverse, reflecting the complexities of human psychology. He recommends avoidance of bodily experiences in many cases as well as reevaluation of the importance of the body, but he doesn’t recommend either the wholesale rejection or embrace of the bodily. We are our souls but, like it or not, we are temporarily embodied, and what happens to the body is thereby experienced by us. Socrates thus exhorts us to live in a way that recognizes both our temporary humanity and our lasting, true nature. Only so can we best pursue knowledge.

I argue that the problem of religious luck posed by Zagzebski poses a problem for the theory of hell proposed by Buckareff and Plug, according to which God adopts an open-door policy toward those in hell. Though escapism is not open to many of the criticisms Zagzebski raises against potential solutions to the problem of luck, escapism fails to solve the problem: it merely pushes luck forward into the afterlife. I suggest a hybrid solution to the problem which combines escapism and the claim that God gives enough grace to those in hell to cancel out any bad moral luck

In De Interpretatione 6-9, Aristotle considers three logical principles: the principle of bivalence, the law of excluded middle, and the rule of contradictory pairs (according to which of any contradictory pair of statements, exactly one is true and the other false). Surprisingly, Aristotle accepts none of these without qualification. I offer a coherent interpretation of these chapters as a whole, while focusing special attention on two sorts of statements that are of particular interest to Aristotle: universal statements not made universally and future particular statements. With respect to the former, I argue that Aristotle takes them to be indeterminate and so to violate the rule of contradictory pairs. With respect to the latter, the subject of the much discussed ninth chapter, I argue that the rule of contradictory pairs, and not the principle of bivalence, is the focus of Aristotle's refutation. Nevertheless, Aristotle rejects bivalence for future particular statements

Plato’s Socrates is often thought to hold that wisdom or virtue is sufficient for happiness, and Euthydemus 278-282 is often taken to be the locus classicus for this sufficiency thesis in Plato’s dialogues. But this view is misguided: Not only does Socrates here fail to argue for, assert, or even implicitly assume the sufficiency thesis, but the thesis turns out to be hard to square with the argument he does give. I argue for an interpretation of the passage that explains the central importance of wisdom for Socrates without committing him to the sufficiency thesis. The result is that the Euthydemus displays a plausible but distinctively Socratic argument for making the pursuit of wisdom the central concern of one’s life