Wisdom, Ignorance and Virtue: New Essays in Socratic Studies

Martha Husain is an associate professor of philosophy at Brock
University in St. Catharines.

This book contains revised versions of a selection of the papers
presented at the Arizona Colloquium on Socrates, which was held at the
University of Arizona in 1996. Exhibiting a shared focus on the early
dialogues, these crisp and well-argued essays are devoted primarily to
an analysis of the arguments—in other words to Plato not as dramatist
or biographer but rather as philosopher. From the book emerges three
fundamental insights.

The first is that our understanding of Socratic argument deepens when
we subject it to the standards of sound argument, rather than using
loose terminology and failing to note informal fallacies. Plato’s
arguments appear remarkably robust when subjected to stringent analysis.
For example, his absolutist prohibition against wrongdoing is seen to be
rationally justified when we ground it not in loose notions of tendance
of the soul or of self-interest, but rather in the Republic’s analysis
of self-destruction.

The second main insight is that Socratic arguments need to be analyzed
in an argumentative context (rather than merely a literary or dramatic
context) because, even within the same dialogue, elenchos is not always
directed to the same objective. Sometimes Socrates tries to expose his
interlocutor’s propositional inconsistency, at other times his scope
inconsistency; because these have different logical properties, so too
does the elenchos in each case.

The third insight has to do with the danger (for the Critias of
Charmides, as for us) of reducing Socratic intellectualism to a mere
technocratic stance disconnected from moral goodness. Capable of
withstanding stringent analysis, Socratic arguments stand in the context
of his (not our) notion of reason.

A sequel to this volume would be very welcome.