The Crito argument depends on a principle that is the bedrock of Socratic ethics: that it is never right to do wrong, even in return for wrong 49ab. Four of the dialogues in this group are concerned with definition of virtues or good qualities, especially virtues: Euthyphro piety or reverence , Laches courage , Charmides temperance or soundness of mind , and Hippias Major the fine or beautiful.
These dialogues of definition indirectly raise questions about the mutual relations of the virtues, and this question is taken up explicitly in the Protagoras , which introduces the doctrines of the unity of virtue and the impossibility of acrasia the doctrine that it is impossible to know what is right and still do wrong. Another corollary is that in seeking virtue we should seek knowledge about virtue. Nevertheless, Socrates entertains strong doubts as to the teachability of virtue.
Socrates sometimes treats virtue on the analogy of techne , however, and techne means a body of specialized knowledge that can be taught. Although Socrates uses this style of conversation for a number of different purposes, it has been called the Socratic method, and in one of its forms is has become known to scholars as the elenchus. Four dialogues in the group show Socrates in contrast to sophists , who were paid teachers of subjects ranging from rhetoric to mathematics.
Some sophists claimed expertise on virtue, and Socrates took it as part of his mission to investigate such claims. The Protagoras treats its eponymous sophist with some respect, but the two Hippias dialogues major and minor poke fun at their namesake, and the Euthydemus shows its sophists as puzzle-makers who cannot make good their claim to teach virtue.
Following the lead of Vlastos and , many scholars represent the philosophical content of these dialogues as teachings of Socrates. This article follows that convention. An elenchus usually concludes in the discomfiture of the partner, who now appears unable to support his initial statement. In the dialogues of this group, the elenchus is a negative instrument, but in the Gorgias Socrates seems to use it in support of his bedrock principle that one should never commit injustice, the principle he uses in his argument in Crito.
In some cases, an elenchus seems only to discredit a person; in others it refutes a position that is under discussion. In those cases, it points the dialogue that contains it toward aporia —an impasse. Socrates applied the method to challenge views he probably held himself as we shall see in the Laches , and he implies in the Hippias Major that he has used elenchus to prevent his being complacent with his own ignorance c—e. To begin with, he will not be satisfied with an answer that points only to a certain kind of reverence, or only to an example of reverence.
The answer must identify a feature that 1 belongs to every kind of reverence generality requirement , and 2 to nothing that is not reverent exclusion requirement , and 3 has explanatory power.
The first two requirements appear in many texts, but the third emerges most clearly in the Euthyphro. We are left to speculate about what would count as stating the essence of reverence; probably it would state what makes things reverent in the way that having three straight sides and three angles makes a plane figure a triangle, while giving delight to geometers does not.
Clarification for the explanation requirement comes from a further requirement, that the explanatory cause of Xness must be always X the synonymy requirement. Hippias Major b;cf. Phaedo d. Scholarly opinion is divided as to whether Socrates is satisfied with any of the definitions of virtues that he considers. Mastery of definitions would be sufficient for the expert knowledge of virtue that Socrates disclaims, so either he lacks that mastery or his disclaimer is as some scholars believe ironic.
The first of these has been attacked as the Socratic fallacy by Peter Geach; Socrates himself thinks he knows things for which he appears to be unable to give definitions. Luckily, no text unequivocally assigns either claim to Socrates, and the matter is under debate. A charitable view would assign to Socrates in place of 1 the view that only expert knowledge on the model of techne requires the ability to give definitions, and in place of 2 the view that we cannot know what the essential features of something are until we know its essence.
Socrates nevertheless has strong opinions about virtues, opinions that guide his search for definitions—for example, that courage is noble or fine Laches d and that we should pursue virtue above all else. It is one thing to aim at virtue and still another to be able to determine what actions virtue requires, as Vasiliou contends.
But if Socrates thinks he lacks mastery of definitions of virtues, then we must ask how he thinks he can be right enough about the virtues even to look for their definitions. This puzzle is taken up to some extent in the Meno. On priority of definition, see Benson and , Wolfsdorf , and Vasiliou For the view that it is wisdom that is prior, see Pangle A number of writers before Socrates had used the word and its associated vocabulary primarily in ethical contexts.
But Socrates was probably the first to identify ethical virtue with what is analogous in the soul to health. Because the soul is more important to us than the body, we should care about nothing so much as virtue, and Socrates understands his role in Athens as that of shaming Athenians into taking this most important concern seriously through the care of the soul 29e—30a. In inquiring after the virtues, Socrates assumes that they have some status as entities, especially in Euthyphro and Hippies Major.
Some scholars have thought this assumption represented an early theory of Platonic forms Allen ; see also Prior and Woodruff forthcoming.
The principal virtues of interest to Socrates in this group of dialogues are courage andreia , reverence or piety eusebeia , to hosion , wisdom sophia , temperance or sound-mindedness sophrosune , and justice dikaiosune. These dialogues raise two general questions about virtues that are important to ethical theory, one concerning instrumentality and another concerning unity. They also raise a question about the analogy between virtue and expert knowledge techne.
Are virtues instrumental for other goods, or are they good in themselves? If they are instrumental, are they instrumental in respect of themselves, by causing virtue to grow in the holders of virtue and in those on whom they have influence? Or are they instrumental in helping us procure external goods for ourselves? On the instrumentality of virtue there was an important dispute between Vlastos and Irwin.
In a famous passage in Republic 1, which has some affinities with dialogues of our group, a sophist named Thrasymachus challenges Socrates to define justice without saying as he was apparently known for doing that justice is the beneficial or the advantageous d.
This is the main theme of the Republic , but it also resonates with the shorter ethical dialogues, as we shall see. The ending of the Hippias Major bears on the problem of instrumentality through a discussion of the beneficial as replicating its own goodness as virtue engenders virtue. Socrates appears to be the first to make eudaemonia happiness, the good life a goal in ethics. Socrates argues in the Protagoras for the unity of virtues, a thesis that has been variously interpreted and may be supported by other dialogues in this group.
Vlastos famously explained the thesis as bi-conditional: that whoever has one virtue has them all. Others Penner, Woodruff have argued for a stronger thesis, such that the definitions of all the virtues would have a common essence. Dialogues of definition, such as the Laches , seem to presuppose that each virtue has its own definition, but, at the same time, such dialogues seem to be moving towards the view that the essence of each virtue is wisdom or knowledge. The Protagoras defines courage as the knowledge of what is and is not to be feared d , but the Laches rejects a similar definition on the grounds that it does not differentiate courage adequately from other virtues e.
And the Euthyphro ends in aporia at an impasse because Socrates is unable to differentiate reverence adequately from justice. Efforts to define sound mindedness sophrosune in the Charmides end in an impasse partly owing to the difficulty of specifying the subject of the knowledge that is the essence of this virtue.
If as seems the case Socrates is never satisfied with a definition of a virtue, this may be because the virtues cannot be differentiated at all. On the unity of virtue, see especially Vlastos and , Penner , Woodruff , and Rudebusch Techne is, at the most basic level, what can be learned and taught. The word is usually used for a body of professional knowledge, mastered by experts on whom laypeople may safely rely.
To establish your credentials in expert knowledge, you should be able to identify your teachers and students Laches b , as well as the specific field of your expertise, which you must have mastered as a whole e. You should also, ideally, be able to give an account of the aim of your profession e.
Gorgias a. Expert knowledge must be rational in its ability to account for what it does. Socrates seems to inquire after virtue as if it were, or at least resembled, the expert knowledge of living well, or the expert knowledge of care for the soul. If so, this knowledge could be taught and learned.
Yet Socrates has grave doubts as to whether virtue can be taught Protagoras a, ff. If Socrates takes virtue to be a kind of knowledge, then he holds a view known as intellectualism. Does Socrates, or does he not, believe that virtue is to be understood on the analogy with expert knowledge? If he believes that virtue is instrumental to happiness as some scholars hold , then he might well believe that virtue is a kind of practical knowledge, and the analogy would be helpful.
If he believes as other scholars hold that virtue is at least partly constitutive of happiness, then the analogy seems misleading, since bodies of expert knowledge are generally valued as merely instrumental for their goals. If Socrates does not subscribe to the analogy, however, why does he use it in argument? He uses it in argument in the context of the larger question whether virtue can be taught, probably on the assumption that, if it can be taught, it can be taught as expert knowledge is taught.
But Socrates questions whether it can be taught at all. The Meno will explore a process of learning without teaching; this process is known as recollection. When experts fail at tasks related to their expertise, Socrates naturally attribute the failure to a lack of knowledge; if he does so in the case of virtue, he commits himself to the view that no one can do wrong in full knowledge; on this see the next section.
On techne and the techne analogy, see Irwin After Aristotle, philosophers have termed this the issue of acrasia. Acrasia , weakness of will, would occur when someone who knows what is right does what is wrong under the influence of passion or in order to secure pleasure. Holders of expert knowledge are supposed to be reliable in the exercise of that knowledge; they are professionals, and part of their professionalism is to ply their trade competently regardless of the weight of passion or the blandishments of pleasure.
So the techne analogy might be construed to imply the impossibility of acrasia. Socrates is not denying that people do wrong under the influence of passion or desire for pleasure; he is rejecting the usual explanation for this, and denying that it occurs in the case of those who have the relevant knowledge.
Plainly, the doctrine presupposes a stringent criterion for knowledge, at least as demanding as the test for techne. A related doctrine is that no one errs voluntarily, a doctrine Plato holds consistently from the Apology to the Laws. If acrasia is impossible, then every moral error involves a cognitive failure about the action or the principle that it violates, and cognitive errors negative or at least weaken responsibility for actions caused by those errors.
Socrates generally assumes that actions taken in ignorance are involuntary, and that therefore the proper response to wrongdoing is not retribution, but education, as he says in the Apology 25e—26a.
In the Hippias Minor , by contrast, Socrates argues that it is better to do wrong voluntarily than in ignorance. Although he is unhappy with this conclusion, he gives no direct hints as to how to avoid it. Aristophanes depicted Socrates in the Clouds BCE as a participant in the two revolutions that constituted the new learning of the period, and these were both exciting and disturbing to ordinary Athenians. The Fifth Century saw an explosion of interest in traveling teachers, later known as sophists, who taught a number of subjects, including the art of words, later known as rhetoric.
Although the art of words was widely used for entertainment, it also had applications in deliberative and forensic rhetoric, and the sophists were accused of teaching their pupils how to win on behalf of a bad cause—to make the worse argument into the stronger. Clever techniques of argument were taught by some sophists, as were serious devices for the effective staging of adversary debate, on which the city-states of those periods depended, both for decisions about policy and for verdicts in criminal cases.
Some people felt that these techniques corrupted political and legal processes. Plato took pains to depict Socrates not only as different from the sophists, but as opposed to them on many points. Natural scientists. Thinkers of the period were developing explanations for natural phenomena that displaced the gods from their traditional roles as causes. Again, Socrates is depicted in the Clouds as involved in this sort of explanation. Again, Plato takes pains in the Apology and later works to show that the mature Socrates is not interested in this project Phaedo 96a—d, Phaedrus c—e.
Still, although he begins with the usual disclaimer of speech-craft, Socrates speaks artfully enough that the result could be used to illustrate a textbook of rhetorical technique.
How, then, did he come under such suspicion? Socrates claims it is because he led a life that seemed strange to his compatriots, in fulfillment of his mission. Socrates claims to have been given this mission by the god, evidently Apollo, and he identifies this mission with his gadfly role of shaming people into sharing his quest for virtue.
He may have developed elenchus which derives from a word for shame for this purpose, but he has another purpose for elenchus as well. Finding none who could pass the test, he concluded that the meaning of the oracle was probably this: that true wisdom belongs to the god, and no human being can be wiser than a person who is aware, as Socrates says he is, of his own inadequacy in wisdom.
In keeping with this result, Socrates is cautious in his philosophical claims in the Apology. On the subject of death, he presents himself as agnostic there, although other texts show him to have been committed to the immortality of the soul. In the Crito Socrates states the doctrines most important to his conception of the ethical life.
He will give up his life rather than compromise his ethics. His peers would all agree that life is not worth living with a badly deformed body; they should agree that life is even less worth living with the sort of deformation that is caused by acting wrongly.
Wrongdoing damages the soul; that is why Socrates believes we must strive to avoid wrongdoing at all costs. Crito, a wealthy Athenian friend of Socrates, has bribed the jailers and prepared means for Socrates to escape from Athens, but Socrates refuses on the grounds that to do so would be to damage the laws wrongfully, and this violates his bedrock principle that one must never do wrong, even in return for a wrong.
He applies this principle, he says, using his old method of accepting the reasoning logos that seems best to him as he reasons about it 46b. The bedrock principle has guided his life so far, and it would be absurd to give it up now merely because his circumstances have changed 46b, 49ab. When Crito appeals to popular opinion on the matter, Socrates replies that the only authority he would accept on the matter would be that of someone who is expert on the matter at hand, which is the effects of doing right and doing wrong.
Because these are analogous to the effects of health and disease on the body, Socrates is looking for an expert on moral health and corruption, apparently for the soul. In the absence of such an expert, however, he must make up his own mind. Because Crito cannot answer, Socrates personifies the laws and imagines their response, on behalf of his obligation to them. Here as elsewhere, with the exception of the Apology , Socrates avoids giving an extensive speech in his own persona.
The argument the laws give is elaborate, and appeals mainly to two points: an agreement they allege Socrates made to obey them by choosing to live in Athens, and the benefits they claim Socrates has received from them, which place Socrates under a stronger obligation to the laws than he has to his parents. Neither Crito nor Socrates can reply to the arguments given by the laws, and their conclusion is allowed to stand. The conclusion of these personified laws—that one must obey the city in all things 51bc —seems to conflict with a memorable text in the Apology , as Grote first pointed out; there Socrates promises to disobey the court if it should let him off on the condition that he give up his mission in Athens 29d.
Scholarly opinions differ over how to reconcile these texts. A dialogue of definition, the Euthyphro takes up the subject of reverence or piety, a virtue that traditionally bears on the keeping of oaths, the treatment of the weak such as prisoners and suppliants , family relationships, and respect toward the gods. The discussion here lifts reverence out of its traditional context, while marking sharply the difference between reasoning about ethics and accepting authority and implying support for the unity of virtue.
His confidence rests on the special knowledge he claims on the subject of reverence. Socrates presupposes that such special knowledge implies knowledge of the definition of reverence. If Euthyphro knows what reverence is, he should teach that to Socrates, so that Socrates may use the knowledge in defense during his own trial.
Socrates helps Euthyphro to a better answer reverence is what is loved by all the gods , but this succumbs to the requirement that a definition state the essence of its subject 11ab. So actions are made reverent not by pleasing a god, but by satisfying the definition of reverence—or so most modern readers have inferred. Socrates then explores the idea that reverence is a proper part of justice, without finding a way to specify what part it is.
Attempts to differentiate reverence from justice by appeal to the gods lead back to the better answer that was refuted earlier. There is no way to differentiate reverence from justice in a definition, because there is no essential difference between them; reverence is simply justice described with reference to the love that the gods bear for justice. A dialogue of definition, the Charmides takes up the subject of temperance or sound-mindedness sophrosune. The main theme of this dialogue is the role of knowledge in virtue.
By the time Plato wrote the dialogue, both men had been killed in the battle of the Piraeus, in BCE. S: Tell me then whether that which is being carried is being carried because someone carries it or for some other reason. S: And that which is being led is so because someone leads it, and that which is being seen because someone sees it? V The Present Participle; Subject Affects Object — S: It is not seen by someone because it is being seen but on the contrary it is being seen because someone sees it, nor is it because it is being led that someone leads it but because someone leads it that it is being led; nor does someone carry an object because it is being carried, but it is being carried because someone carries it.
Is what I want to say clear, Euthyphro? I want to say this, namely, that if anything comes to be, or is affected, it does not come to be because it is coming to be, but it is coming to be because it comes to be; nor is it affected because it is being affected but because something affects it.
Or do you not agree? S: What is being loved is either something that comes to be or something that is affected by something? S: So it is in the same case as the things just mentioned; it is not loved by those who love it because it is being loved, but it is being loved because they love it? Surely that it is loved by all the gods, according to what you say?
S: It is loved then because it is pious, but it is not pious because it is loved? S: And because it is loved by the gods it is being loved and is dear to the gods? S: The god-beloved is then not the same as the pious, Euthyphro, nor the pious the same as the god-beloved, as you say it is, but one differs from the other.
S: Because we agree that the pious is beloved for the reason that it is pious, but it is not pious because it is loved. Is that not so? S: And that the god-beloved, on the other hand, is so because it is loved by the gods, by the very fact of being loved, but it is not loved because it is god-beloved.
VII Conclusion — S: But if the god-beloved and the pious were the same, my dear Euthyphro, and the pious were loved because it was pious, then the god-beloved would be loved because it was god-beloved, and if the god-beloved was god-beloved because it was loved by the gods, then the pious would also be pious because it was loved by the gods; but now you see that they are in opposite cases as being altogether different from each other: the one is of a nature to be loved because it is loved, the other is loved because it is of a nature to be loved.
There are two alternatives offered here. The other implies that it is an inherent quality of the pious which makes the gods love it, and that it is not divine love which makes the pious pious. The application of an analogy to resolve a question hinges on the assumption that conclusions reached from considering the analogy may freely be applied back to the original problem.
After establishing the distinction between subject and object, Socrates also clarifies that it is the subject that is the agent of the verb affecting the object — the object is affected not because it is being affected but because something affects it V.
It is also riddled with Socratic irony: Socrates poses as the ignorant student hoping to learn from a supposed expert, when in fact he shows Euthyphro to be the ignorant one who knows nothing about the subject holiness. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the dialogue is the inconclusiveness with which it ends. This inconclusiveness is hardly unique to the Euthyphro, but it is worth investigating. Is Plato suggesting that there is no such thing as a definition of holiness, that there is no one feature that all holy deeds have in common?
And if he does think that there is a common link, why does he not reveal it to us in the dialogue? We may link the inconclusiveness of the dialogue to the dialogue form itself and the irony Socrates employs. Plato's main goal is to teach us, and he believes firmly as we gather in other dialogues, notably the Meno that knowledge only comes when we are able to justify and account for our true beliefs. Thus, teaching is not simply a matter of giving the right answers. It is a matter of leading the student toward the right answers and ensuring that the student can explain and justify the answers rather than simply repeat them.
The dialogue form is ideal for this kind of teaching; it shows Socrates leading Euthyphro through Euthyphro's own reasoning, and thereby letting Euthyphro sort things out for himself.
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