The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Plato's Early Dialogues (SUNY series in Ancient Greek Philosophy)
Book Details
Author(s)Sean D. Kirkland
PublisherState University of New York Press
ISBN / ASIN1438444044
ISBN-139781438444048
AvailabilityUsually ships in 24 hours
Sales Rank681,532
MarketplaceUnited States 🇺🇸
Description
A provocative close reading revealing a radical, proto-phenomenological Socrates.
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.
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.
