I'll be using this book to teach ethics, Fall 2008. ( )

Dialogues taken from around the time of Socrates' death. I picked up this book wanting to understand more about the thinking of Socrates and the progressions of logical thought. My only previous introduction to "the Socratic Method" was from pop culture references and its abysmal application in public education.Apology, Crito and Phaedo all center upon Socrates' trial, personal philosophy and final conversation (respectively) and, while interesting from an academic point of view, I did not find them very helpful with regard to understanding the manner in which Socrates' plied his trade.Euthyphro and Meno, on the other hand, were remarkable for my understanding.In Euthyphro, Socrates attacks the question of the meaning of virtue when a young man decides to sue his father for the (supposedly) wrongful death of one slave that had killed another. In Meno, Socrates again tries to grasp an underlying meaning to the word, this time with a focus as to the nature of virtue, and whether or not it is a kind of knowledge that can be taught or it is ingrained in the "soul" of a man. While, in Meno, the conversation detours into a discussion of the soul and Socrates' personal belief that knowledge is eternal and "recollected" by the individual rather than learned or discovered, the characterization of knowledge, education and definition were extremely interesting.G. M. A. Grube's translations are at once simple and elegant prose which made for both enjoyable reading and clear understanding of the text. While the particular dialogues were not necessarily the best ones to cut my teeth on for my particular learning project, I would definitely recommend this collection for any one wanting more of the Man behind the Method. ( )

Brilliant stuff. ( )

The Five Dialogues are: Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Symposium, and the Republic. The old Classics Club edition includes an introduction by Louise Ropes Lomis.

The following reflections are taken from a larger essay on the modern philosophies of right in Hobbes and Spinoza, Kant and Hegel.

The modern philosophies of right form a dialectical unity of opposites. The basic contradiction is already contained in their task as Hegel articulates it. Even those systems that—like Spinoza's—derive from their principles no transcendent duty to obey the sovereign are ultimately brought to confess the preponderance of the merely existent. In this they again echo Socrates—this time in his cell, logically demonstrating to his friend Crito the justice of his own imminent execution. The historical irony here is that Socrates represents for us the discovery of the concept, which he employed to prise open convention's cage and begin the articulation of the modern subject's demand that the world measure up to reason, its reason, the logos. The love of wisdom has always been a practice subversive to all forms of authority; philosophy questions every nomos. And yet some form of peace belongs to the conditions of possibility of the philosopher's practice, a point not lost on Socrates. He is wary of slipping into a performative contradiction; he has unknowingly incurred a debt to power, and it rules him still. For the practice of the dialectic depends on using concepts—in other words, rules—to cut off all escape from a particular outcome. The point is expressed felicitously, though I suspect unintentionally, when Jürgen Habermas writes in the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere of the "lightfooted coercion" (leichtfüssiger Zwang) of argument—for no matter how lightfooted reasons might be, they are still Zwang, they still aim at forcing a conclusion. It was Socrates who submitted discourse to the discipline of the concept, raising it to the level of universality; dialogues like the Euthyphro have their foremost significance in precisely this turn away from the immediacy of the particular. The dialectic brought a powerful ruse by which to undermine the authority of traditional practices: it asked for the ratio behind them. It was demanded that they present themselves—to employ one of Kant's juridical metaphors—before the court of reason. In fact the demand was ingenuous, seeking as it did an answer in terms of a dualism that did not yet have reality. Nomos—as conventional practice, custom—is positively given, monolithic. But subjectivity is negativity. In world-historical terms the principle by which Socrates rejected the "unexamined life" (Apology 38 a) turned out to be the most subversive at all. The devil it released has yet to be satisfied. The undertakings of the individual who attempts to live by the precepts of her reason are hindered by the world outside of herself. Colliding with its irrational substance the subject learns that it is not yet the sovereign being that philosophy promises it could be. Novalis is supposed to have said that philosophy is really homesickness, "the urge to be at home everywhere." (See the opening pages of G Lukacs' Theory Of The Novel.) In any case, the subject called forth by the fundamentally practical Socratic project—not metaphysics, but the problem of the good life was always at the centre of Socratic philosophizing—is not content merely to articulate its alienation from the world. Always implicit in philosophy, the interpretation of the world, is the demand that it be changed.

The world considered under the aspect of its resistance to subjective purposes is nature, physis. For as long as they confront the subject as basically alien to its own will the laws of human societies—irrespective of the differences between institutional arrangements—fall under this category too, as second nature. The subordination of nomos to physis is something to which the modern philosophies of right attest, despite themselves. It is true that at every point they seek to demonstrate the contrary, as if the subject's self-extrication from the bonds of tradition had in fact been definitively achieved with Socrates. However Plato's Crito would seem to suggest otherwise. It almost appears as if the laws of the city have perceived the threat to their rule, and are out to take revenge. The heretic must drink hemlock, but not only that—he must recant as well, and that in the very language of his subversive heresy. When Crito comes to persuade his friend to escape from prison he finds that the destroyer of the laws is their thrall as well:

SOCRATES: Look at it this way. If, as we were planning to run away from here, or whatever one should call it, the laws and the state came and confronted us and asked: "Tell me, Socrates, what are you intending to do? Do you not by this action you are attempting intend to destroy us, the laws, and indeed the whole city, as far as you are concerned? Or do you think it possible for a city not to be destroyed if the verdicts of its courts have no force but are nullified and set at naught by private individuals?" What shall we answer to this and other such arguments? For many things could be said, especially by an orator on behalf of this law we are destroying, which orders that the judgments of the courts shall be carried out. Shall we say in answer, "The city wronged me, and its decision was not right." Shall we say that, or what?

CRITO: Yes, by Zeus, Socrates, that is our answer.
(Crito, trans. Grube, 50 a-c.)

Socrates leaps to the defence of the laws with the very means—reason and the concept—by which he had made the radical undermining of their foundation possible, an irony that objectively justifies Crito's naive astonishment. The argument that Socrates makes is that to escape is tantamount to destroying the laws—an exaggeration so bold as to almost be believable—and that to do so is bad form on the part of one to whom they gave substance. "We have given you birth, nurtured you, educated you," say the laws, by means of the philosopher's ventriloquy. (Crito 51 c.) You could have gone elsewhere—so the argument continues—if we were not to your liking. As you enjoyed our protection it must be said that you agreed—implicitly, of course—to our authority, ultimately our power over your life and death. (Cf. Crito 51 d-e.) And the trap snaps shut. Socrates is taken in by this argument that he himself articulates—which posits a choice where there is none, and in fact describes nothing other than a protection racket—because as a devotee of argument he fetishizes the principle of performative consistency. The drinker of hemlock goes to his death not like Achilles, whose heroism he cites in his defence, (Apology 28 c-d) but rather in order to pull off an audacious confidence trick on his fellow Athenians: to convince them that his discursive tools have a force, a Zwang that is real. Secretly dispairing of this reality, every philosophy of right has repeated the Socratic identification with the power of what is.