ABSTRACT: This article discusses the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur in light of the distinction between labyrinth and maze. According to the myth, Ariadne helped Theseus to escape from a labyrinth by giving him ball of string. But if a labyrinth is unlike a maze in presenting no choices to the wanderer, then why did Theseus need a clue? Though this question has not been systematically addressed in the scholarship, two lines of response can be identified. First, some scholars maintain that the 'labyrinth' in the myth must be a multicursal maze, for otherwise the story would make no sense. Secondly, others hold that they can make sense of the myth even if the labyrinth has but a single path. I argue against both positions in favour of an account that highlights the constructive use of contradiction in myth.
In “The Socratic Method and Psychoanalysis,” Jonathan Lear argues that Socrates' conversations seek to draw out an irony that exists within human virtue. In this commentary, I suggest that Lear should identify irony with aporia to align his interpretation with Plato’s texts and capture the epistemic dimension of Socrates' method. The Socratic dialogue is a form of inquiry that encourages the interlocutor to carry on the inquiry. The irony of aporia is that the interlocutor grasps his life’s principle by recognising that he does not know what it is.
Kwasi Wiredu defines conceptual decolonisation as an activity in which Africans divest themselves of undue colonial influences, but his descriptions of this process are either unrelated to divesting or work quite generally, and not in favour of an African point of view. Wiredu's approach to decolonisation appears to be largely indistinguishable from the business of philosophy.
Abstract In its attempt to deflate of the pretensions of ‘Western knowledge’, the epistemic decolonisation movement carries on the work of Socrates, who sought to persuade those who thought that they were wise but were not, that they were not. Yet in its determination to recover and elevate indigenous systems of thought, decolonisation seems opposed to this very work, which is always corrosive of inherited belief. Decolonisation both expresses and contradicts the spirit of Socratic philosophy.
In this essay, I explain and clarify Jacob Klein’s significant yet difficult account of how to read a Platonic dialogue. I argue that Klein takes Plato’s dialogues to be discursively incomplete dramas that the audience is asked to make whole by its participation. A Platonic dialogue thus comes into being only when readers or auditors examine the arguments and themselves.
In books 2 and 3 of the Republic, Socrates criticizes Homer and Hesiod for telling the greatest falsehoods about the greatest things; in book 1, he assumes that Simonides is a `wise and blessed' bard who knows the truth. Socrates' position on the authority of poets seems contradictory. Can this tension be resolved? I argue that it can be. Building on but revising Nicholas Pappas' suggestion that Socrates' charity in interpreting poetry is a form of disrespect, I show that the contradiction in his position is not in principle but in use. Socrates assumes that a true poet must be a knower of the good; however, in book 1, he uses this assumption to absolve Simonides from error, whereas in books 2 and 3, he infers that Homer, Hesiod, and other lesser figures are not true poets. This difference in use is to be explained by changes in interlocutors and a material concern with early childhood education.t
Scholarly attempts to understand Plato's distinction between philosophy and sophistry typically concentrate on explicit thematic discussions or on dialogues in which primary characters are well known sophists or rhetoricians By contrast, this paper elucidates the nature of sophistical speech by means of an interpretation of Laches, a Socratic dialogue with two Athenian generals about courage. Textual argument is provided to show that one of the two primary interlocutors, Nicias, attempts to avoid refutation by means of certain dialectical defence mechanisms. The nature of these defence mechanisms is analysed and shown to imply a form of discursive self-alienation, that is, an unwillingness to say what one really thinks about virtue. Socrates' elenchus is then interpreted as an attempt to penetrate Nicias's dialectical defences in order to reconnect him to a pre-theoretical self-understanding from which philosophy must take root.
Why does Socrates favour definitional speech discussion of virtue’s instances and attributes? Why does he take such a dim view of applied ethics? In this article, I criticise the received answers to these questions and offer a different view. I argue that Socrates favours definitional dialogue because it actualises knowledge that the logic of his argument shows to be essential to virtue. By leading the interlocutor to a paradoxical definition of virtue as knowledge, Socrates engenders this knowledge in his soul.
The Socratic fallacy is the supposed mistake of inferring that somebody does not know any instances or attributes of a universal because of their inability to give a satisfactory definition. I argue that Socrates does not make this inference. Instead he interprets definitional failure as indicating that the interlocutor has not stated his knowledge. Moreover, I argue that Socrates' commitment to the necessity of definitions of universals for knowledge of particulars reduces to the claim that a person who knows something about virtue has the ability to speak the whole of it. This is, I suggest, not so much a 'style of mistaken thinking' as a profound affirmation of the possibility of philosophy.
Socrates' midwife metaphor in Theaetetus depends logically on the concept of male spiritual pregnancy. Male spiritual pregnancy is typically understood as a process in which a young man develops in his mind a theory or idea; a spiritual child is, on this view, a theory; and spiritual childbirth is the painful movement of a developed theory from the mind into the speech-world. Although this account of spiritual pregnancy and maieutics is widely accepted in the scholarship, it cannot be upheld. The intelligibility of Socrates' midwife metaphor requires the recognition of two different kinds of pregnancy, the false and the true. The first and false kind is roughly as the standard interpretation says that it is: a theory germinating in the mind; but Theaetetus's true spiritual child is not a theory of knowledge-it is wisdom in his soul; true spiritual pregnancy is the actualisation of the soul's potential for wisdom.
To misquote the greatest of Plato’s students: to love Plato is to love truth more.1In this extraordinary book, Laurence Bloom takes the fundamental principle of discursive reasoning as a ‘springboa...
Some scholars maintain that there is no logical progression between the first three cities constructed in Plato’s Republic. In this paper I show that they are wrong. On the view I defend, the dialectic of Plato’s civic architecture is centred on an account of justice as geometrical equality. The first city expresses this account by assigning social roles on the basis of τέχνη. The second city disrupts the geometrical schema in order to accommodate the human desires for greatness and self-knowledge, with the third city re-establishing the geometrical pattern by means of poetic catharsis, a noble lie, and the placement of an armed camp.
This article uses Plato's Crito as a lens through which to consider the question of whether a South African citizen should emigrate from South Africa. While this question is not exactly parallel to that of whether the condemned Socrates should flee Athens, it has much more to do with justice than is commonly thought. For in order for one to know whether one has an overall duty to remain in or leave South Africa, one must determine what one owes to one's country and compatriots, one's community, one's family, and oneself.
In Plato's Laches, Socrates ascribes knowledge of courage to his eponymous interlocutor and makes an attempt to reconstruct it in speech. His attribution of knowledge to Laches controls his discursive behaviour in the dialogue, requiring him to withhold judgements of error, construe apparent error as a failure of speech rather than knowledge, and search for the deeper truth underlying the overt content of Laches' utterances. Socrates' method in this elenchus can be described as a kind of epistemic exegesis,' which aims to draw out and give discursive shape to knowledge of virtue that it assumes that the interlocutor already possesses.
The genre of philosophical commentary is characterized by an attitude of textual deference, or what I call a principle of authority. To read in conformity with the authority principle is to forego the prerogative to judge that the author has made a mistake. This article offers a defense of the principle of authority as hermeneutical precept by showing that it facilitates the practice of philosophy as care of the self. When its function is so understood, the authority principle turns out to be compatible with a substantial degree of intellectual autonomy and is also epistemically benign.
In this article I apply Thaddeus Metz’s ethical methodology to the ancient Greek ideal of σωφÏοσÏνη in order to show that it generates a distorted account of ubuntu. If ubuntu is a virtue concept, then Metz’s analytical method will not reconstruct it — because it fails to determine whether ubuntu refers to one of a plurality of fundamental virtues, the fundamental virtue, or virtue itself.
Unlike certain commentary traditions of philosophy in which deference to an authoritative author was a central feature, there are within the analytical tradition no recognised authorities to whom the reader is required to defer. This paper takes up the question of whether this anti-authoritarian position in philosophy can be sustained. Three lines of argument are considered. According to the first, there are no credible authorities in philosophy, or, even if there were, these authorities could not be identified by the non-expert reader. According to the second, since no philosopher is infallible, many readers have on many occasions epistemic grounds for non-deference to the author. According to the third, even if some readers have epistemic reason for deference to some authors, an anti-authoritarian stance can be justified in terms of distinctively philosophical values such as conceptual understanding or intellectual autonomy. Although each of these lines of argument contains an element of truth, a sufficient justification for philosophical anti-authoritarianism remains surprisingly elusive.
