This chapter offers an account of the inspiration for their active advocacy of political, social, and educational reform that three key figures of the British nineteenth century found in Plato: John Stuart Mill, George Grote (author of the classic three-volume study Plato of 1865), and Benjamin Jowett (whose translation of the entire Platonic corpus of 1871 was to be hugely influential). For both Mill and Grote, the importance of the probing Socratic method portrayed in the dialogues was paramount. Grote contrasted it with the tyranny exercised over the dissenting individual by the conformism of society at large: what he called King Nomos, with his eye particularly on the Great Speech Plato puts in Protagoras’s mouth in the Protagoras. To his mind, the Republic represented a sad betrayal of the Socratic spirit. It was Jowett who was chiefly responsible for making that dialogue’s moral idealism central to the education Oxford provided for the nation’s future elite, and whose endorsement of its radical proposals for equality for women in education and in politics is particularly notable.

This is a close scrutiny of De Anima II.5, led by two questions. First, what can be learned from so long and intricate a discussion about the neglected problem of how to read an Aristotelian chapter? Second, what can the chapter, properly read, teach us about some widely debated issues in Aristotle’s theory of perception? I argue that it refutes two claims defended by Martha Nussbaum, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Sorabji: (i) that when Aristotle speaks of the perceiver becoming like the object perceived, the assimilation he has in mind is ordinary alteration of the type exemplified when fire heats the surrounding air, (ii) that this alteration stands to perceptual awareness as matter to form. Claim (i) is wrong because the assimilation that perceiving is is not ordinary alteration. Claim (ii) is wrong because the special type of alteration that perceiving is is not its underlying material realisation. Indeed, there is no mention in the text of any underlying material realisation for perceiving.

This chapter is the only detailed study available to date on the long introductory scene of the Charmides. It provides systematic analysis of the social, historical, and dramatic context, sketches the main characters, discusses their interactions and motivations, dwells on the story of Zalmoxis and the corresponding holistic conception of therapy, and assesses the method that Socrates proposes to follow in order to examine the question of whether Charmides has sôphrosynê.

This chapter discusses the section of the dialogue in which Critias advances an ingenious interpretation of the Delphic inscription ‘Know Thyself’ in order to introduce his account of temperance as self-knowledge. The analysis shows how Critias’ speech pursues ideas he has articulated earlier in the dialogue, and in particular the intuition that one cannot be both temperate and ignorant of one’s temperance – an intuition on account of which Critias abandoned the definition of temperance as ‘doing one’s own’. It is suggested that Critias’ appeal to the Delphic inscription is intended to evoke the god’s verdict about Socrates in the Apology and bring to the forefront the two competing conceptions of self-knowledge at work in the dialogue.

The main aim of this chapter is to assess Socrates’ summary of the key moves of the investigation and the criticisms that he directs against both his interlocutor and himself. The first section argues that, although some of Socrates’ criticisms against Critias’ ‘science of science’ can also raise problems for Socrates’ own philosophy and method, they serve a constructive rather than a destructive purpose: while they point to the limitations of Socratic dialectic, they do not imply that the latter is useless but only that it cannot by itself take us all the way to virtue and truth. The second section discusses Socrates’ last exchange with Charmides, while the third section offers a new interpretation of the final scene of the dialogue and wraps up the discussion of the characters’ development.

This chapter considers Charmides’ second definition of temperance as aidôs – modesty or a sense of shame. It proposes a new reconstruction of the argument, addresses the charge that the latter contains a paralogism, and discusses the social, political, and moral implications of the relation between sôphrosynê and aidôs.

This chapter is the first detailed study to date of the methodological debate between Critias and Socrates with regard to an aspect of the so-called technê analogy, namely an analogy or set of analogies that Socrates frequently draws between virtue and the technai (arts, crafts, disciplines) on the basis of the assumption that the former closely resembles the latter. The feature of the analogy under debate concerns the object of an epistêmê or technê (these two terms are used interchangeably in this context). While Socrates maintains that temperance, like every other science or art, has an aliorelative object, i.e. it is a science of something distinct from itself by virtue of which it is beneficial, Critias contends that temperance, unlike the other sciences or arts, is a ‘science of only itself and the other sciences’ or, as a shorthand, a ‘science of science’; and is beneficial precisely by virtue of its strictly reflexive character. In the end Critias is allowed to get his own way but, as the following chapters argue, his position proves to be untenable.

The chapter offers a new reconstruction of the initial philosophical exchange between Critias and Socrates. It makes manifest the complex argumentative structure of that exchange and interprets the elenctic arguments deployed in the opening phases not as self-standing refutations, but as arguments intended to disambiguate the meaning of ‘doing one’s own’ and invite Critias to restate his position in clearer terms. Thus they pave the way for the final refutation of this definition (163d7–164d3). The commentary also reassesses Critias’ interpretation of Hesiod and its dialectical value.

This chapter examines how the interlocutors articulate more fully Critias’ conception of temperance or self-knowledge as a ‘science of science’. Also, it highlights features of the text designed to remind us of Socrates’ pursuit of self-knowledge through the cross-examination of himself and others about ‘the most important things’. Next, the analysis focuses on Socrates’ twofold puzzle motivating the investigation that will follow. The latter will be centred on two problems, one having to do with the possibility or conceivability of a ‘science of science’, the other with the benefit that such a science might bring.

The chapter examines Charmides’ first definition of temperance as ‘a kind of quietness’ and Socrates’ refutation of it. It reconstructs the argument by which the definition is refuted and argues that, if we pay attention to the details and nuances introduced by Socrates, we find that the refutation is more successful than it has been commonly believed to be.