Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I ARCHAIC AND CLASSICAL GREECE
- 1 Greek political thought: the historical context
- THE BEGINNINGS
- 2 Poets, lawgivers, and the beginnings of political reflection in archaic Greece
- 3 Greek drama and political theory
- 4 Herodotus, Thucydides and the sophists
- 5 Democritus
- 6 The Orators
- 7 Xenophon and Isocrates
- 8 Socrates and Plato: an introduction
- 9 Socrates
- 10 Approaching the Republic
- 11 The Politicus and other dialogues
- 12 The Laws
- 13 Plato and practical politics
- 14 Cleitophon and Minos
- ARISTOTLE
- PART II THE HELLENISTIC AND ROMAN WORLDS
- Epilogue
- Bibliographies
- Index
- Map 1. Greece in the fifth century bc"
- References
8 - Socrates and Plato: an introduction
from THE BEGINNINGS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART I ARCHAIC AND CLASSICAL GREECE
- 1 Greek political thought: the historical context
- THE BEGINNINGS
- 2 Poets, lawgivers, and the beginnings of political reflection in archaic Greece
- 3 Greek drama and political theory
- 4 Herodotus, Thucydides and the sophists
- 5 Democritus
- 6 The Orators
- 7 Xenophon and Isocrates
- 8 Socrates and Plato: an introduction
- 9 Socrates
- 10 Approaching the Republic
- 11 The Politicus and other dialogues
- 12 The Laws
- 13 Plato and practical politics
- 14 Cleitophon and Minos
- ARISTOTLE
- PART II THE HELLENISTIC AND ROMAN WORLDS
- Epilogue
- Bibliographies
- Index
- Map 1. Greece in the fifth century bc"
- References
Summary
Approaches to Platonic interpretation
To introduce Socrates and Plato is to introduce the problem of the relation between them. Although other contemporaries left portraits of Socrates as well, it is Plato’s writings – primarily a body of dialogues in which Plato himself never appears – which stamped the figure of his teacher indelibly on the history of Western philosophy. Because Socrates is best known to us as a character in Plato’s writings, there arises what has been called the ‘Socratic problem’. Can a real or ‘historical’ Socrates, with distinctive beliefs, be identified on the basis of the testimony roughly contemporaneous with his life which survives from Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, and (a generation later) Aristotle? Or is, perhaps, the Socrates we value largely the portrayal Plato makes of him?
The ‘Socratic problem’ is complicated by the fact that Plato’s ‘Socrates’ seems to argue for contradictory positions in different dialogues. For example, in Protagoras (352–8) Socrates argues that because no one does wrong willingly, vice results simply from ignorance, an argument which assumes that only rational beliefs determine action. But in Republic IV he explains vice as due to the two irrational, or less than rational, parts of a tripartite soul when not stably governed, as they should be, by the third and rational part. This apparent contradiction has often been resolved by assuming that the Protagoras is one of a group of dialogues written early in Plato’s career (the ‘early’ dialogues), in which the character ‘Socrates’ is meant by Plato to represent the historical Socrates’ views, whereas the Republic is one of the ‘middle period’ dialogues in which Plato is using Socrates simply as a mouthpiece for his own theory.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought , pp. 155 - 163Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000
References
- 4
- Cited by