Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 January 2009
In Plato's dialogue the Euthyphro, Socrates poses a question that has come to be known as the ‘Euthyphro dilemma’. Since the first formulation of this problem is surely the best, I will quote from Socrates himself:
… For consider: is the holy loved by the gods because it is holy? Or is it holy because it is loved by the gods?
1 Plato, , The Dialogues of Plato, trans, with analysis by R. E. Allen (Yale University Press, 1984), 50.Google Scholar
2 Kierkegaard, Spren, Edifying Discourses, Vol. I, trans. David F. and Lillian Marvin Swenson (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1943), 40.Google Scholar
3 Ibid.,43.
4 Ibid.46.
5 ‘Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics’, Philosophical Review 74 (January 1965), 15.Google Scholar
6 The Expectation of Faith: NEW YEAR'S DAY, in Edifying Discourses, Vol. 1,25.Google Scholar
7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 147.Google Scholar
8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Notebooks 1914–1916, 2nd edn, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (University of Chicago Press, 1979), 74e.Google Scholar