This excursus began with a reading of segments from the Metaphysics and Posterior Analytics. Through these texts, first philosophy, that is, the investigation of conditions, emerges as essentially informed by considerations regarding at once sensibility and action (aisthēsis and praxis). In this context, Aristotle delineates the intertwinement of perceptual and practical motifs in its phenomenal or even phenomenological character.

The Main Section is devoted to an analysis of Nicomachean Ethics Alpha to Zeta and related texts. Aristotle's discussion of ēthos, far from a circumscribed and secondary discipline, is progressively disclosed as involved in casting light on primordial structures – of nature, human nature, first origins, final causality. The ethical treatises interrogate those altogether embodied and practical matters in which any human inquiry, including the “science of wisdom,” is rooted. In this way, they make explicit and articulate the awareness of the non-scientific ground of science.

The Interlude returns to the Metaphysics, most notably to the discussion of the so-called principle of non-contradiction in Book Gamma. It aims to show at work what was previously observed regarding the intellectual virtues (particularly, intellect and wisdom) in their inseparability from the virtues pertaining to character and action. Far from being a “metaphysical” law, the principle of non-contradiction is shown in its genuinely physical traits, as that which informs what is – as that which informs being in its becoming and acting.

The Concluding Section focuses on Nicomachean Ethics Theta to Kappa, the discussions of friendship and the good.

Books Theta and Iota of the Nicomachean Ethics are devoted to the issue of friendship, philia. With regard to length, the discussion on friendship exceeds by far any other thematic elaboration in the treatise. Following this analysis, Book Kappa, which contains a meditation on the good in light of political association, brings the Ethics to a close.

Let us, from the outset, highlight the belonging of the phenomenon of friendship in the problematic of the good. Friendship occurs for the sake of and thanks to the good. In other words, the good is what elicits it, what calls for friendship. Friendship, love in the broadest sense, is for and of the good. Adhering to the Aristotelian articulation, what follows aims at illuminating this interpretive hypothesis.

At the very beginning of Book Theta, Aristotle points out that “friendship is a virtue, or something with virtue, and besides, it is most necessary to life, for no one would choose to live without friends, though they would have all the other goods” (1155a4–6). We should underline both the connection of friendship with excellence and the necessity of friendship. Aristotle further underscores this necessity in the lines shortly following the passage just quoted:

Metaphysics Gamma opens by addressing the first of the aporiai laid out in Book Beta, namely, the question: does it belong to one or many sciences to investigate the causes, or principles (995b4–6, discussed at 996a18–b26)? As Aristotle notes, the issue was already anticipated in Book Alpha:

Aristotle proceeds to illuminate this point further when he speaks of “the science taken in the highest degree”:

ON ETHICS AS FIRST PHILOSOPHY

By reference to the ethical treatises and the Politics, but also to other texts of the Aristotelian corpus (most notably, the Metaphysics and the treatises of the Organon), the present study undertakes to demonstrate the indissoluble intertwinement of practical and theoretical wisdom (phronēsis and sophia as well as, concomitantly, praxis and theōria) in Aristotle's thinking. In this manner, I propose that sophia, theoretical wisdom, far from an autonomous and separate pursuit, should be acknowledged as integrally involved in becoming, sensibility, experience, and, hence, action. Of course, this line of inquiry cannot but address critically the established view of the separation, indeed the opposition of the two modes of reason. Such a dichotomous logic is retained even by those who, like Arendt and Gadamer, variously emphasize the practical over against the theoretical and do so by merely inverting the order of the hierarchy. However, the point is not to respond to the traditional privilege of theoretical wisdom by privileging practice or “rehabilitating” practical thinking instead. Rather, the aim here is to understand these modes of human endeavor in their irreducibility, to be sure, and yet, simultaneously, in their inseparability. More precisely, the investigation should cast light on the way in which practical considerations decisively mark the beginning or condition of all contemplation as well as discursive investigation.

Even a friendly reader, who knows his or her Plato, might at this point object that my argument has skirted at least one major obstruction that has the potential to wreck it: the Phaedo (not to mention the others; more of them in subsequent chapters). It is all very well, such a reader may say, to claim that Socrates and Plato are at one. But doesn't the Phaedo contradict this? In the Apology, Socrates exhibits a studied agnosticism towards the idea of his surviving after death (does he not?), whereas in the Phaedo he enthusiastically supports the idea, even at one point claiming to have proved it, before he is forced to retreat to a more moderate claim. What is more (the objection might continue), he uses the soul's survival as the basis for a picture of philosophy that seems literally a world apart from the one he presents in the Apology. Instead of philosophy's being the route to a better life in this world, in the Phaedo it becomes a means to a better existence after death, in which the philosopher may perhaps even go to live with the gods, escaping permanently from the cycle of death and rebirth to which, Socrates now suggests, the generality of the human race is condemned.

This is a formidable objection, and all the more formidable insofar as the perspective of the Phaedo has, historically, been taken as partly emblematic of Plato and Platonism.

Last in the order of exposition, in the Republic, of what the true lover of wisdom will want to learn, and of what the imagined philosopher-rulers will be brought to ‘see’, comes the ‘greatest’ subject of all, the ‘greatest object for learning’ (to megiston mathēma, vi, 504d2–3, etc.). Adimantus expresses surprise that there could be any greater subject to be learned about than the ones they've already treated, i.e. justice and the other excellences – to which Socrates retorts that Adimantus already pretty well knows what this new subject is, because he's heard about it often enough (a point that will be repeatedly reinforced): it's the form of the good (hē tou agathou idea, 505a2), which is what makes just things and the rest useful and beneficial (sc. so that it really is a more important subject than justice and the other excellences). Adimantus also knows that ‘we’ (humanity in general?) don't have adequate knowledge of the good – and if we don't have knowledge of it, then even the most complete knowledge of the rest will be of no use to us, any more than if we merely possess something without its also being good for us.

Of the small but elite group of Plato's latest dialogues the Timaeus is the only one to which I shall devote a chapter – and it will be a short chapter, dealing with a single but quite crucial aspect of the dialogue: the status of the account that Plato has the main speaker, Timaeus, give of the cosmos and its origins, together with the closely connected question of Plato's, and Socrates', relationship to this Timaeus. (What I present here, as in the previous chapter, will be a sketch, on outline of an idea, but one that is not only consistent with but grows directly from the argument of the book as a whole.) My brief treatment of this dialogue is intended to show the application to the Timaeus of my special thesis about the reasons why Plato chooses, in his late dialogues, not to use Socrates in the leading role that he reserved almost exclusively for him in the first two dialogue groups. Given my larger thesis about the closeness, even virtual identity, of Plato to his character Socrates, the question why, in the latest group, he should promote others to this role, in five out of six cases, is clearly pressing.

There is a short argument at the end of Republicv (474b–480a) that demands a chapter to itself, so pivotal is it for the interpretation of Plato. One common reading has the argument making knowledge (epistēmē, gnōsis) and belief (or ‘judgement’, ‘opinion’: doxa) into two distinct faculties, with two distinct sets of objects: forms, on the one hand, and particular things that ‘share in’ forms on the other. On this reading, the person at the level of belief has no contact at all with the objects of knowledge, and the knower's knowledge relates entirely to forms; there will be no knowledge, properly speaking, of particulars, and perhaps there will even be no mere beliefs about forms (either one fully grasps such objects or one is not grasping them at all). A whole range of different versions of this set of ideas – usually labelled the ‘two-world’ view – is attributed to Plato; however, following my usual practice, I shall dispense with lengthy discussion of others' views and pass directly to the business of presenting and arguing for my own.

The reading I shall offer in this case will not in its general outlines be particularly original (my route to it will be more so); my aim is chiefly to show that and how my overall reading of Plato will negotiate a passage to which interpreters have accorded such importance – rather more, I suspect, than Plato would have accorded it himself, and more than it possesses for Socrates in the context in which he unfolds it.

In this chapter I set out to explore the notion of ‘examination’, exetazein, as the central term in Socrates' statement of his philosophical ‘mission’ in the Apology. I shall take as my starting-point the main version of that statement in the Apology, pairing it by way of anticipation with a contrasting passage from the Phaedrus – which will serve as an introduction to the apparently rather different notion of the self, and the soul, that seems to emerge, and with some radical consequences, in the Republic. The Phaedrus will be the topic of the fourth, short section of the chapter (the second will be an equally brief digression on learning as recollection); chapter 5 will then, inter alia, discuss the degree of difference between the conceptions of soul in the pre-Republic dialogues and in the Republic and after. (Chapter 4 will discuss related issues in the – pre-Republic – Gorgias.) The focus throughout will be on what Plato's Socrates understands by self-examination, which I take to contain the key to a proper interpretation of what it means for Socrates to ‘examine’ others.

Here is Socrates' ringing statement of the nature of his life's mission in the Apology

I wrote in the Preliminaries, at the end of section 8, of a ‘preferred [Socratic] account of the nature of knowledge to which Plato subscribes’. This ‘preferred account’ of knowledge is – unexcitingly – the one that Socrates and Theaetetus reach at the end of the Theaetetus: that knowledge is true belief together with a logos (a definition, or more generally a description, or a list of features) which will somehow definitively mark off the thing known from other things. This account is itself a close relation of the one Socrates offers in the Meno (knowledge as true belief ‘bound’ by calculation, logismos, of the cause), and is equally, and similarly, problematical. How exactly will the ‘account’, the logos, be able to add anything definitive to the belief, which if true must already be successfully referring to whatever it claims to be about?

Not a few interpreters have taken this problem to be fatal to the account, so that for them the Theaetetus will end with no solution at all: either because the dialogue was designed as a dialectical exercise, or alternatively, on the more standard view, because it was designed to show that there is no way forward without Platonic forms – to which, allegedly, there is no overt reference in the Theaetetus.

Socrates proposes in Republicv–vi that political rule should be put in the hands of philosophers, provided that they also ‘in no way fall short of [non-philosophers] in experience, nor rank after them in any other part of excellence’ (vi, 481d6–7). The question, especially for Glaucon, is what philosophers will bring to the task of ruling that non-philosophers cannot; and that will also be the question for the present chapter. It will turn out that there are two answers, one more sophisticated, one less so; the latter is nearer the surface, and more immediately persuasive for Socrates' (Plato's) immediate audience, while the former is truer to his real position – which will be the subject of a separate chapter (chapter 8).

Socrates begins his answer to Glaucon's question – why philosophers? – in that argument which I discussed in the preceding chapter, at the end of Book v. As we saw, his starting-point is that philosophers, lovers of wisdom, are distinguished as such by the fact that they love all aspects of wisdom, something which sets them apart from others who seem to love every aspect of something, like the ‘sight-lovers’, who are actually quite picky about what they love. The latter don't even recognize the very thing they should really be loving (beauty itself); they only recognize the many beautiful particulars, which they misidentify as beauty.

Much of the last chapter has depended on Socrates' being serious when he claims, at the beginning of Republicii, that he was satisfied with what he said to Thrasymachus in the preceding book, even if Glaucon and Adimantus quite evidently are not (368b5–7). However so poorly have many of the arguments in the book been received by modern interpreters that it might even appear more charitable to suppose that the remark is just part of a characteristic episode of Socratic self-deprecation.Glaucon and Adimantus have just restated the case for injustice, and Socrates says he is in a quandary:

It may help readers of this book to have before them, for the purposes of orientation, a list of all the certainly genuine works with a note of what I take to be their real main subjects.

1. Apology: introduction/manifesto.

2. Crito: the implications of Socrates' ‘mission’ for the city of Athens and its institutions.

3. Euthyphro: on piety and wisdom/knowledge/expertise (Socrates consults a religious expert).

4. Charmides: on ‘sound-mindedness’ (sōphrosunē) and wisdom/knowledge/expertise (Socrates talks to someone said to be ‘soundminded’).

5. Laches: on courage and wisdom/knowledge/expertise (Socrates consults two generals).

6. Meno: on excellence and wisdom/knowledge/expertise (Socrates talks to a Thessalian aristocrat – and, briefly, an Athenian democrat, who is also one of his accusers: Anytus).

7. Ion: on excellence and wisdom/knowledge/expertise (Socrates consults an expert on the poets).

8. Protagoras: on excellence and wisdom/knowledge/expertise (Socrates confronts sophists).

9. Euthydemus: on excellence and wisdom/knowledge/expertise (Socrates confronts eristics).

10. Gorgias: on excellence and wisdom/knowledge/expertise (Socrates confronts orators/rhetoricians).

11. Hippias Minor: on the difference between excellence and other kinds of knowledge/expertise (Socrates talks to another sophist).

12. Lysis: on ‘friendship’, desire and the (real) good (Socrates talks to two friends).

13. Symposium: desire and the (real) good (Socrates confronts ordinary views of love and desire).

14. Phaedo: on the nature of philosophy (the love of/search for wisdom); life, death and the cosmos (Socrates talks to two members of his circle).

15. Cratylus: on language and reality (Socrates talks to representatives of two rival positions).

16. […]

The Apology, or Socrates' Defence, pretends to be the speech, or rather speeches, that Socrates gave at his trial on a charge of ‘doing what is unjust by corrupting the young and not believing in gods the city believes in but other new divine entities’ (Apology 24b8–c1). The main proposal of the present chapter is that even as Plato has Socrates defend his way of life to the jury, he, Plato, is also issuing a kind of manifesto on his own behalf, which tells his readers – in the broadest terms – about his fundamental concerns and aims. (There are no chronological implications to this proposal; Plato might have written the Apology at any time during that relatively early part of his career in which the stylometrists place it.) However the route to this destination will be a fairly circuitous one.

‘NOT EXCELLENCE FROM MONEY, BUT FROM EXCELLENCE MONEY …’

Near the end of the Apology, Socrates explains to the 501 members of the jury that even in the unlikely event that they should propose to let him go free on condition that he stopped philosophizing and corrupting their sons, he wouldn't stop. He'd go on saying what he always says, to anyone he meets: