The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato's Early Dialogues

By Sean D. Kirkland

Subjects: Plato, Ancient Greek Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, Philosophy
Series: SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, SUNY series in Ancient Greek Philosophy
Paperback : 9781438444048, 289 pages, July 2013
Hardcover : 9781438444031, 289 pages, November 2012

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations for Ancient Works Cited
Introduction: Socrates and the Hermeneutic of Estrangement
PART I. SOCRATIC PHENOMENOLOGY
1. Setting Aside the Subject-Object Framework in Reading Plato
Aristotelian Assessments of Plato’s Socrates
Construction or Destruction in the Early Dialogues
From Excessive Being to Objective Reality and Back
            Articulating Plato’s Anti-Relativism
            Distinguishing Socrates’ Search for Definitions from Twentieth-Century Nominalism
            Excavating the Everyday Understanding of Being in Plato
            Consequences of Presupposing an Understanding of Being as Objective
2. On Doxa as the Appearing of ‘What Is”
Doxa versus Opinion
Phainesthai and Doxa

PART II. VIRTUE’S ONTOLOGICAL EXCESS AND DISTANCE
3. The Excessive Truth of Socratic Discourse
The Indefinsibility of Philosophy in Plato’s Apology of Socrates
            Socrates’ Muthos
            Socrates’ Logos
The Prooimioni to Socrates’ Apologia
            The Rhetorical Discourse of Socrates’ Accusers
            Socrates’ Way of Discourse in His Defense
            Socratic Truth as Deinos
            Socrates’ Way of Discourse in His Philosophical Activity
4. The Sheltering of Thechnē versus the Exposure of Human Wisdom
Socrates versus the Sophists
From Shelter to Exposure
The Technē-Tuchē Antithesis
The Socratic Understanding of Technē in Light of Metaphysics Alpha
The Non-Knowing of Virtue as Socrates’ Aim
Socrates and the Technē-Model of Virtue
5. The Truthful Elenctic Pathos of Painful Concern
Elenctic Pain and Being Concerned by Virtue
Meletē in the Apology and Aporia throughout the Early Dialogues
A Phenomenological Consideration of Meletē/Aporia
Serenity in the Interpretations of Nehamas, Vlastos, and the Stoics
Meletē/Aporia as Itself the Alētheia of ‘What Virtue Is’
Distance and Excess versus Transcendence of Immanence
PART III. SOCRATIC VIRTUE IN THE FACE OF EXCESSIVE TRUTH
6. The Courage of Virtue and the Distant Horizon of the Whole in the Laches

Finite Transcendence and Socratic “Being With”
Sophistication and the Everyday Attitude in the Introduction of the Two Generals
The Unity of the Question ‘What is Virtue?’
Being Many Everyday
            Aristotle on Socrates and Definition Katholou
            Meno 71d–73d
            Euthyphro 5c–7a
Socrates’ Interlocutors and the Confusion of Appearance and Being
Aporia and the Truth of Appearances
The Socratic Here and Now
CONCLUSION: APORIA IN THE MIDDLE DIALOGUES
Idea/Eidos as ‘Look’ and Phenomenal Being in the Middle Dialogues
Alētheia as Divine Wandering
The Good beyond Being and the Ideas as Excessive Measures
Human Monstrosity and Being between One and Many
Notes
Bibliography
Index

A provocative close reading revealing a radical, proto-phenomenological Socrates.

Description

Winner of the 2013 Symposium Book Award, presented by the Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy

Modern interpreters of Plato's Socrates have generally taken the dialogues to be aimed at working out objective truth. Attending closely to the texts of the early dialogues and the question of virtue in particular, Sean D. Kirkland suggests that this approach is flawed—that such concern with discovering external facts rests on modern assumptions that would have been far from the minds of Socrates and his contemporaries. This isn't, however, to accuse Socrates of any kind of relativism. Through careful analysis of the original Greek and of a range of competing strands of Plato scholarship, Kirkland instead brings to light a radical, proto-phenomenological Socrates, for whom "what virtue is" is what has always already appeared as virtuous in everyday experience of the world, even if initial appearances are unsatisfactory or obscure and in need of greater scrutiny and clarification.

Sean D. Kirkland is Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University.