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Author: Donald R. Morrison
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 437
ISBN-13: 0521833426
DOWNLOAD EBOOKEssays from a diverse group of experts providing a comprehensive guide to Socrates, the most famous Greek philosopher.
Author: Sara Ahbel-Rappe
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2018-05-01
Total Pages: 298
ISBN-13: 1438469276
DOWNLOAD EBOOKArgues that Socratess fundamental role in the dialogues is to guide us toward self-inquiry and self-knowledge. In this highly original and provocative book, Sara Ahbel-Rappe argues that the Platonic dialogues contain an esoteric Socrates who signifies a profound commitment to self-knowledge and whose appearances in the dialogues are meant to foster the practice of self-inquiry. According to Ahbel-Rappe, the elenchus, or inner examination, and the thesis that virtue is knowledge, are tools for a contemplative practice that teaches us how to investigate the mind and its objects directly. In other words, the Socratic persona of the dialogues represents wisdom, which is distinct from and serves as the larger space in which Platonic knowledgeethics, epistemology, and metaphysicsis constructed. Ahbel-Rappe offers complete readings of the Apology, Charmides, Alcibiades I, Euthyphro, Lysis, Phaedrus, Theaetetus, and Parmenides, as well as parts of the Republic. Her interpretation challenges two common approaches to the figure of Socrates: the thesis that the dialogues represent an early Plato who later disavows his reliance on Socratic wisdom, and the thesis that Socratic ethics can best be expressed by the construct of eudaimonism or egoism.
Author: Edward G. Ballard
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2012-12-06
Total Pages: 228
ISBN-13: 9401194327
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is intended to offer an interpretation of an important aspect of Plato's philosophy. The matter to be interpreted will be the Platonic myths and doctrines which bear upon self-knowledge and self-ignorance. It is difficult to say in a word just what sort of thing an interpretation is. Rather than attempting to provide a set of rules or meta-rules supposed to define the ideally perfect interpretation, several distinctions will be suggested. I should like to distinguish the philological scholar from the inter preter by saying that the latter uses what the former produces. The function of the scholarly examination of a text is to make an ancient (or foreign) writing available to the contemporary reader. The scholar solves grammatical, lexical, and historical problems and renders his author readable by the person who lacks this scholarly learning and technique. The function of the interpreter is to make use of such available writings in order to render their content more intelligible and useful to a given audience. Thus, he thinks through this content, explains, and re-expresses it in a form which can be easily related to problems, persons, doctrines, or events of another epoch or of another class of readers. At the minimum, the interpretation of a philosophic writing may be thought to prepare its teaching for application to matters which belong in another time or context. Detailed application of a doctrine is, of course, still another thing.
Author: Edward G. Ballard
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2012-05-06
Total Pages: 189
ISBN-13: 9789401194334
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book is intended to offer an interpretation of an important aspect of Plato's philosophy. The matter to be interpreted will be the Platonic myths and doctrines which bear upon self-knowledge and self-ignorance. It is difficult to say in a word just what sort of thing an interpretation is. Rather than attempting to provide a set of rules or meta-rules supposed to define the ideally perfect interpretation, several distinctions will be suggested. I should like to distinguish the philological scholar from the inter preter by saying that the latter uses what the former produces. The function of the scholarly examination of a text is to make an ancient (or foreign) writing available to the contemporary reader. The scholar solves grammatical, lexical, and historical problems and renders his author readable by the person who lacks this scholarly learning and technique. The function of the interpreter is to make use of such available writings in order to render their content more intelligible and useful to a given audience. Thus, he thinks through this content, explains, and re-expresses it in a form which can be easily related to problems, persons, doctrines, or events of another epoch or of another class of readers. At the minimum, the interpretation of a philosophic writing may be thought to prepare its teaching for application to matters which belong in another time or context. Detailed application of a doctrine is, of course, still another thing.
Author: Lorraine Smith Pangle
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-05-23
Total Pages: 287
ISBN-13: 022613668X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe relation between virtue and knowledge is at the heart of the Socratic view of human excellence, but it also points to a central puzzle of the Platonic dialogues: Can Socrates be serious in his claims that human excellence is constituted by one virtue, that vice is merely the result of ignorance, and that the correct response to crime is therefore not punishment but education? Or are these assertions mere rhetorical ploys by a notoriously complex thinker? Lorraine Smith Pangle traces the argument for the primacy of virtue and the power of knowledge throughout the five dialogues that feature them most prominently—the Apology, Gorgias, Protagoras, Meno, and Laws—and reveals the truth at the core of these seemingly strange claims. She argues that Socrates was more aware of the complex causes of human action and of the power of irrational passions than a cursory reading might suggest. Pangle’s perceptive analyses reveal that many of Socrates’s teachings in fact explore the factors that make it difficult for humans to be the rational creatures that he at first seems to claim. Also critical to Pangle’s reading is her emphasis on the political dimensions of the dialogues. Underlying many of the paradoxes, she shows, is a distinction between philosophic and civic virtue that is critical to understanding them. Ultimately, Pangle offers a radically unconventional way of reading Socrates’s views of human excellence: Virtue is not knowledge in any ordinary sense, but true virtue is nothing other than wisdom.
Author: David Lawrence Levine
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2015-10-30
Total Pages: 373
ISBN-13: 149850177X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKReturning from the battle of Potidaea, Socrates reenters the city only to find it changed, with new leadership in the making. Socrates assumes the mask of physician in order to diagnose the city’s condition in the persons of the young and charismatic Charmides and his ambitious and formidable guardian Critias. Beneath the cloak of their self-presentations, Doctor Socrates discovers a profound and communicable disease: their incipient tyranny, “the greatest sickness of the soul.” He thereby is able to “foresee” their future and their role in the oligarchy (The Thirty Tyrants) that overthrows the democracy at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The unusual diagnostic instrument of this physician of the city: the question of sophrosyne (customarily translated as moderation). The analysis of the soul of this popular favorite uncovers a distorted development with little prospect of self-knowledge, and that of the guardian, a profound disabling ignorance, deluded and perverted by his presumed practical wisdom. Alongside on the bench sits Socrates whose ignorance, by contrast, shows itself to be enabling, measured and prospective. In this way, the profound ignorance of the tyrant and the profound ignorance of the philosopher are made to mutually illuminate one another. In the process, Levine brings us to see Plato’s extended apologia or defense of Socrates as “a teacher of tyrants” and his counter-indictment of the city for its unthinking acceptance of its leaders. Moreover, in the face of modern skepticism, we are brought to see how such “value judgments” are possible, how Plato conceives the prospects for practical judgment (phronȇsis). In addition we witness the care with which Plato presents his penetrating diagnoses even amidst compromised circumstances. Levine, further, is at pains to situate the specific dialogic issues in their larger significance for the philosophic tradition. Lastly, the author’s inviting style encourages the reader to think along with Socrates. The question of tyranny is always relevant. The question of our ignorance is always immediate. The conversation about sophrosyne needs to be resumed.
Author: Tarán
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2021-08-04
Total Pages: 733
ISBN-13: 9004453288
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book consists in a reprint of papers dealing mostly with Grecoroman philosophy, ranging from the 5th century BC to the 6th century AD, and concerned mainly with the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, the Early Academy, the Platonic and Aristotelian later traditions.
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Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-02-14
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 1472502612
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the Platonic work Alcibiades I, a divinely guided Socrates adopts the guise of a lover in order to divert Alcibiades from an unthinking political career. The contributors to this carefully focussed volume cover aspects of the background to the work; its arguments and the philosophical issues it raises; its relationship to other Platonic texts, and its subsequent history up to the time of the Neoplatonists. Despite its ancient prominence, the authorship of Alcibiades I is still unsettled; the essays and two appendices, one historical and one stylometric, come together to suggest answers to this tantalising question.
Author: Kevin Crotty
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2022-11-08
Total Pages: 261
ISBN-13: 1666927120
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA 2023 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Socrates famously claimed that he knew nothing, and that wisdom consisted in awareness of one’s ignorance. In Ignorance, Irony and Knowledge in Plato, Kevin Crotty makes the case for the centrality and fruitfulness of Socratic ignorance throughout Plato’s philosophical career. Knowing that you don’t know is more than a maxim of intellectual humility; Plato shows how it lies at the basis of all the virtues, and inspires dialogue, the best and most characteristic activity of the philosophical life. Far from being simply a lack or deficit, ignorance is a necessary constituent of genuine knowledge. Crotty explores the intricate ironies involved in the paradoxical relationship of ignorance and knowledge. He argues, further, that Plato never abandoned the historical Socrates to pursue his own philosophical agenda. Rather, his philosophical career can be largely understood as a progressive deepening of his appreciation of Socratic ignorance. Crotty presents Plato as a forerunner of the scholarly interest in ignorance that has gathered force in a wide variety of disciplines over the last 20 years.
Author: Thomas C. Brickhouse
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 9780195101119
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSocrates, as he is portrayed in Plato's early dialogues, remains one of the most controversial figures in the history of philosophy. This book concerns six of the most vexing and often discussed features of Plato's portrayal: Socrates' methodology, epistemology, psychology, ethics, politics, and religion. Brickhouse and Smith cast new light on Plato's early dialogues by providing novel analyses of many of the doctrines and practices for which Socrates is best known. Included are discussions of Socrates' moral method, his profession of ignorance, his denial of akrasia, as well as his views about the relationship between virtue and happiness, the authority of the State, and the epistemic status of his daimonion. By revealing the many interconnections among Socrates' views on a wide variety of topics, this book demonstrates both the richness and the remarkable coherence of the philosophy of Plato's Socrates.
