Socratic Studies is the companion volume to Gregory Vlastos' Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (1991). It contains, as promised in the Introduction (pp. 18–19) to that work, revised versions of three previously published essays on Socrates plus some new material. Sadly, not as much new material as he had planned to write.

Chapter 1 derives from “The Socratic Elenchus,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1 (1983), 27–58. It is the most extensively revised, with some substantial changes and numerous smaller ones. The changes are GV's response to comments and criticisms made in the lively discussion that followed the original publication. The 1983 volume of Oxford Studies already contained (at pp. 71–4) GV's “Afterthoughts on the Socratic elenchus,” which are here revised, expanded and made consistent with Chapter 1 under the heading “Postscript to ‘The Socratic elenchus.’”

In the course of entering corrections and improvements from various dates (the last being 30 January 1991) I have occasionally had to make a decision on whether an omission or change was deliberate or simply a slip in the typing up; I am confident that no point of substance is affected. In the Appendix to Chapter 1 GV started to expand his account of the Euthydemus, but only two inconclusive paragraphs were written; these have been omitted. Throughout the book I have checked references and corrected mistakes of citation.

Chapter 2 derives from “Socrates' Disavowal of Knowledge,” Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1985), 1–31. The major change is the removal of pp. 23–6 on the “Socratic Fallacy,” which was superseded by the material that appears here as Chapter 3.

In Plato's earlier dialogues – in all of them except the Euthydemus, Hippias Major, Lysis, Menexenus – Socrates' inquiries display a pattern of investigation whose rationale he does not investigate. They are constrained by rules he does not undertake to justify. In marked contrast to “Socrates” speaking for Plato in the middle dialogues, who refers repeatedly to the “method” (μέθoδoς) he follows (either in general or for the special purpose of some particular investigation), the “Socrates” who speaks for Socrates in the earlier dialogues never uses this word and never discusses his method of investigation. He never troubles to say why his way of searching is the way to discover truth or even what this way of searching is. He has no name for it. λεγχoς and the parent verb λέ Χ (“to refute,” “to examine critically,” “to censure”), he uses to describe, not to baptize, what he does. Only in modern times has elenchus become a proper name. The “What is the F?” question which Socrates pursues elenctically about other things he never poses about the elenchus, leaving us only his practice to guide us when we try to answer it for ourselves. Lacking his definition of it, ours can only be a hypothesis – a guess. And we may guess wrong.

I guessed wrong thirty-five years ago in the account of the elenchus I put into my Introduction to Plato's Protagoras and so have others before or since.

In Plato's earliest dialogues, when Socrates says he has no knowledge, does he or does he not mean what he says? The standard view has been that he does not. What can be said for this interpretation is well said in Gulley, 1968: Socrates' profession of ignorance is “an expedient to encourage his interlocutor to seek out the truth, to make him think that he is joining with Socrates in a voyage of discovery” (p. 69). More recently the opposite interpretation has found a clear-headed advocate. Terence Irwin in his Plato's Moral Theory holds that when Socrates disclaims knowledge he should be taken at his word: he has renounced knowledge and is content to claim no more than true belief (Irwin, 1977: 39–40).

I shall argue that when each of these views is confronted with the textual evidence each is proved false: there are texts which falsify the first, and others which falsify the second. How could this be? These views are proper contradictories: if either is false, must not the other be true? Not necessarily. If Socrates is making appropriately variable use of his words for “knowing” both views could be false. I shall argue that this is in fact the case, proposing a hypothesis which explains why Socrates should wish to do just this. I shall review the relevant evidence (section I), develop the hypothesis (section II), and exhibit its explanatory power (section III).

The first interpretation is virtually ubiquitous. It has even captured the dictionaries. Webster's gives this entry under “irony”:

The lines that close the death-scene in the Phaedo are well known:

Was Socrates really as good as that? I have never seen this question raised anywhere in the vast literature on him. I raise it in full view of the fact that throughout his corpus Plato presents his teacher as a man without a peer in three of the virtues most honored among the Greeks – courage, sophrosyne, and piety. Plato is as emphatic on the third as on the other two, making it the crux of the defense against the charge of impiety on which Socrates was to be condemned to death: Socrates' practice of philosophy had been itself a lifelong exercise of piety, obedience to the god of Delphi who had “ordered him to philosophize, examining himself and others.” Plato makes it clear that it was just because of unflinching obedience to that divine command that Socrates had been convicted: had he been willing to propose self-muzzlement as an alternative he could have been acquitted.

So in the case of those three qualities Socrates' character is flawless, granite-solid in Plato's portrait of him. But what of the one that forms the punch-word in the epitaph: “and most just”? Plato feels so sure that on this score too the record is perfect that he has Socrates say he will face divine judgment in the nether world confident that he “had never wronged anyone, man or god.”

MORAL VS. TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE

There is a passage in the Laches which poses a problem for the interpreter of Socrates' moral theory. Though often discussed in the scholarly literature, there has been as yet no definitive solution to its puzzle. It occurs in Socrates' argument with Laches 192D–193C.

The answer Laches had just proposed – “endurance” – (192B–C) to “What is courage?” had been rejected because it failed to stipulate that, to qualify as courageous, endurance had to be guided by wisdom. Drop that stipulation and the answer is easily discredited:

When Laches agrees – he could hardly do otherwise – it looks as though Socrates would concede that courage is wise endurance. But he does not. What he now wants to know is what sort of wisdom this would have to be: “Wise in what (είς τí φρóνoς)? In all things, be they great or small?”

In the preceding chapter I argued for a hypothesis which, if true, would solve one of the standing puzzles in the history of Western philosophy: how a man who was anything but a skeptic – an earnest moralist, eager to propagate new, powerful moral doctrines of his own – betrayed no awareness of inconsistency in claiming that he had the strongest of reasons for those doctrines and yet said he did not know if those doctrines were true. There is no inconsistency on the hypothesis that he is making a systematically dual use of his words for knowing, disavowing what philosophers had generally understood by “knowledge” at the time, namely, what I have called “knowledgec,” whose hallmark is infallible certainty, while avowing the highly fallible knowledge I have called “knowledgeE,” where Socrates’ claim to know p is simply the claim that p is elenctically viable, i.e., that if he were to pit it against its contradictory in elenctic argument it would prevail.

To say that this has been a standing puzzle of philosophical historiography may seem surprising, for it has not been treated as such in the copious literature on the subject. The reason for this, I believe, is simple: the relevant textual evidence has not been confronted. The evidence for one horn of the dilemma – for Socrates' disavowal of knowledge – is spread out so abundantly on the surface of Plato's text that no one reading it even in a poor translation could miss it.