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Thomas C. Brickhouse and Nicholas D. Smith Socrates on Trial. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989. Pp. xiv + 337. - Gregory Vlastos Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher: The Townsend Lectures. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1991. Pp. xii + 334.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Francis Sparshott
Francis Sparshott*
Affiliation:
50 Crescentwood Road, Scarborough, ON, Canada, MIN 1E4
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Type
Critical Notice
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , September 1992 , pp. 411 - 425
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1922

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References

1 Times Literary Supplement (December 15-21, 1989), 1393

2 From now on, a really well-constructed work of scholarship might be fairly said to be 'built like a Smith Brickhouse.'

3 Thucydides I 22, as translated (with apposite discussion) in Vlastos, 253. Vlastos claims that the citation would support Brickhouse and Smith's position (as stated on 10), but that is doubtful.

4 Anyone who has tried to follow the Salman Rushdie affair, especially if they have read The Satanic Verses, may be struck by the way in which an impassioned and doubtless sincere accusation of impiety can be vigorously pursued without the accusers ever troubling to make clear precisely what the offense is supposed to have been.

5 The phrase translated as 'unexamined life,' anexetastos bios, is itself ambiguous; it could mean 'life without inquiry or investigation,' and is so rendered in Liddell and Scott's Lexicon. But the immediately preceding words at Apology 38 A5, 'examining both myself and others' (kai emauton kai allous exetazontos), render that interpretation untenable.

6 The taste for blandness surfaces again when Vlastos is discussing the Delphic oracle: the riddling answers of the god are deplored as 'making fools of those who earnestly seek his help' (243), as though a god were an indulgent nurse. The Greeks lived in a rough world, and Vlastos's comment here comes from a mindset quite alien to it.