The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato’s Early Dialogues

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

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 Thechne versus the Exposure of Human Wisdom Socrates versus the Sophists From Shelter to Exposure The Techne-Tuche Antithesis The Socratic Understanding of Techne in Light of Metaphysics Alpha The Non-Knowing of Virtue as Socrates' Aim Socrates and the Techne-Model of Virtue 5. The Truthful Elenctic Pathos of Painful Concern Elenctic Pain and Being Concerned by Virtue Melete in the Apology and Aporia throughout the Early Dialogues A Phenomenological Consideration of Melete/Aporia Serenity in the Interpretations of Nehamas, Vlastos, and the Stoics Melete/Aporia as Itself the Aletheia 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 Aletheia as Divine Wandering The Good beyond Being and the Ideas as Excessive Measures Human Monstrosity and Being between One and Many Notes Bibliography Index