Ledbetter, Grace M.

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Review Of  Does Socrates Have A Method? Rethinking The Elenchus In Plato\u27s Dialogues And Beyond  Edited By G.A. Scott

 Swarthmore CollegeWorks   Classics Faculty Works   10-1-2005  Review Of "Does Socrates Have A Method? Rethinking The Elenchus In Plato's Dialogues And Beyond" Edited By G.A. Scott  Grace M. Ledbetter Swarthmore College, gledbet1@swarthmore.edu   Let us know how access to this work benefits you.  Follow this and additional works at: http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-classics/    Part of the Classics Commons   Recommended Citation Grace M. Ledbetter. (2005). "Review Of "Does Socrates Have A Method? Rethinking The Elenchus In Plato's Dialogues And Beyond" Edited By G.A. Scott". Classical Review. Volume 55, Issue 2. 426-428. http://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-classics/1  This work is brought to you for free and open access by the Swarthmore College Libraries. It has been accepted for inclusion in Classics Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. The Classical Reviewhttp://journals.cambridge.org/CARAdditional services for The Classical Review:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereRethinking the ElenchusGrace M. LedbetterThe Classical Review / Volume 55 / Issue 02 / October 2005, pp 426 - 428DOI: 10.1093/clrevj/bni237, Published online: 09 May 2006Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0009840X04005608How to cite this article:Grace M. Ledbetter (2005). Rethinking the Elenchus. The Classical Review, 55, pp 426-428 doi:10.1093/clrevj/bni237Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/CAR, IP address: 130.58.64.71 on 09 Mar 2014‘Figures of Socrates’ include Kahn’s piece; a piece by J.-F. Mattéi on ‘Socrates theStranger’ as an ontological µgure, related to the origin and nature of philosophy; acompelling article by M.-C. Bataillard showing the failure of Aristotle as a historicalsource for Socrates, as his Socrates, throughout the Metaphysics and especially thethree ethical works, is none other than the author of the (erroneous) thesis that virtueis knowledge; and a piece by M. Gourinat on Karl Popper’s Socrates.The nine essays on the Socratics open with three pieces supposedly addressing thetransition from Socrates to his followers (although this is an issue that characterizesevery occasion on which Socrates entered written literature). C. Natali gives aninteresting reading of the Socrates in Xenophon’s Oikonomikos. Giannantoni looks atAlcibiades as a positive example of the converted Socratic pupil in Aeschines andother Socratic literature. R. Muller proposes that Socrates and his followers arecrucial players in the evolution of western concept of freedom, and that amid arhetoric of ‘negative freedom’ (after I. Berlin), we see a positive freedom for virtue,which itself remains ill-deµned. The section on Antisthenes includes RomeyerDherbey on the Ajax and Odysseus as opposing views of warfare and A. Brancacciand M. Balmès on the tortuous questions of Antisthenes’ logic in, respectively,Socrates’ dream in Plato’s Theaetetus 210c–202c and Aristotle’s Metaphysics H.3. In aµnal set of essays on the schools, S. Husson compares Diogenes’ Politeia to that ofPlato, A. Boutot asserts the importance of the Megarians for Heidegger’s reading ofAristotle, and Brunschwig reassesses Cyrenaic epistemology.University of Colorado, Boulder S. H. PRINCEdoi:10.1093/clrevj/bni236426   RETHINKING THE ELENCHUSG. A. S (ed.): Does Socrates Have a Method? Rethinking theElenchus in Plato’s Dialogues and Beyond. Pp. xiii + 327. UniversityPark, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Cased,US$45. ISBN: 0-271-02173-X.In his famous paper on Socratic method, ‘The Socratic Elenchus’ (Oxford Studies inAncient Philosophy I [1983], pp. 27–58, reprinted with revisions in G. Vlastos,Socratic Studies [Cambridge, 1994], pp. 1–37), Vlastos claimed that althoughSocrates was himself exclusively a moralist and therefore not re·ective orself-conscious about methodology and its terminology, there was nevertheless alogical structure common to many important arguments in the early Socraticdialogues. The interlocutor asserts a thesis, p. Socrates shows the interlocutor that heis also committed to other views, q, r, which are inconsistent with p. Socrates and hisinterlocutor conclude that p is therefore false. Vlastos claimed to be not merelydescribing the structure of Socratic method, but also revealing a rather serious threatthat lurks within it. How can Socrates possibly claim to have proved that p is false,when all he has actually done is show that p and q are inconsistent? The interlocutor,had he been a little more shrewd, might have gone on to deny q, leaving p unscathed.What we must see is that this is not a narrowly logical or methodological problem,but one that cuts to the core of any Classicist’s or philosopher’s attempt to understandSocrates in Plato’s early dialogues. At stake here is nothing less than the question ofwhether there is a viable constructive side to Socratic philosophy. Does Socratesmerely show that his interlocutors are inconsistent, or does he draw conclusions thatThe Classical Review vol. 55 no. 2 © The Classical Association 2005; all rights reservedhe a¸rms are true and basic for moral reform? Construed less charitably, doesSocrates mislead us into thinking that he has made some progress in defending moralpositions, when all he has really done is catch his hapless interlocutors in logicalinconsistencies that do not in themselves point toward a particular conclusion?There can be no doubt that Vlastos called our attention to a problem offundamental importance to Socratic philosophy. He also formulated an intriguingsolution, which o¶ers an explanation for how Socrates’ conclusions can be justiµed.Both his formulation of the problem and his solution have sparked a history ofcontroversy, the results of which are, in this reader’s mind at least, not quite soinconclusive as the introduction to our current volume would suggest. Does SocratesHave a Method? aims to ‘reorient the discussion of the multifarious strategies andtactics employed by Socrates in Plato’s dialogues and to spawn new scholarly researchinto previously neglected aspects of the topic’ (p. 6). Viewing Vlastos as emblematicof the ‘analytic’ approach to philosophy, many (but not all) contributors to thisvolume fault his focus on the logic of arguments at the expense of what they take to belarger concerns. Although the authors in this collection do not in general do justice tothe philosophical signiµcance of Vlastos’ contribution, they do ask new questions,and the answers they provide, if they do not in the end supersede or even fully addressthe most intriguing puzzles Vlastos raised, broaden the discussion in welcome ways.The volume is divided into four sections, each containing three essays followed by aresponse written by someone taking a contrasting interpretive approach.The authors in the µrst part take an historical and philological view of Socraticmethod and methodological terminology. Both Lesher and Ausland argue thatSocratic method inherits earlier traditions of literary and philosophical methodology(Parmenides’ use of elenchos in fr. 7 and traditional rhetorical topoi in forensiccontexts, respectively). These comparisons illuminate the literary and rhetoricalsigniµcance of Socratic method, and I would suggest that they also summon us backto the poets and to elements we may now see as nascent structures of philosophicalargumentation within the early poetic tradition. Although Charles Young (in hiscritical response) raises some shrewd objections, H. Tarrant’s important piece onPlato’s use of elenchos and exetasis seriously questions the entrenched assumptionthat elenchos is the term that best describes Socratic interrogation.A focus on logic and the speciµcs of Vlastos’s position generates some provocativeessays in the book’s second section. An article authored jointly by M. Carpenter andR. Polansky, together with Brickhouse and Smith’s critical comments, challenges thenotion of a unique Socratic method by undermining the attempt to provide a univocalaccount of the Socratic elenchus (although it should be noted that Vlastos neverclaimed there was a single form of Socratic argument, only that many importantarguments were formulated in the pattern he described). In his ‘Elenctic Inter-pretation and the Delphic Oracle’, M. McPherran makes some headway into thephilosophical issues at stake by suggesting an alternative to Vlastos’ explanation forhow the elenchus generates truth. Brickhouse and Smith’s conclusion to this section, aspirited, democratic attempt to see Socrates as ‘only like us’, misguidedly infers fromthe (questionable) assumption that Socrates’ method was not unique, that it does not,and does not claim to, generate reliable truths.Authors in the third and fourth sections turn to an eclectic selection of dialogues todiscuss the nature of Socratic argumentation. A polemical relationship between‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ styles of interpretation surfaces throughout, and thedebate in these sections boils down to the contrast between ‘dogmatic’ and‘non-dogmatic’ readings of Plato. This general controversy has particular relevance   427for our basic question of whether Socratic method is constructive philosophically.Representing the ‘continental’ approach, Gonzalez uses the (possibly spurious)Clitophon and the Euthydemus to argue that Socratic method is ‘essentiallyprotreptic’, while in a discussion of the Lysis, Renaud suggests that, along with itslogical function, the elenchus aims to humble the individual. Heavily in·uenced bythe work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, P. Christopher Smith argues that the Philebus’ realtheme is philosophical method. Gerson’s comments on all three essays raise salientobjections on behalf of a standard developmentalist view of the Platonic dialogues.Like the essays in the third section, three pieces on the Charmides (by Schmid,Press, and Carhvalho, followed by a critical response by Waugh) suggest that Socraticmethod is not constructive of moral doctrine in the way that Vlastos claimed.Carvalho could be said to speak for all three when he concludes that ‘the formation of[a] virtuous character, not the formation of a positive moral doctrine, is theconstructive e¶ect of the Socratic method’ (p. 267). It seems to me that our authorsstand in danger of drawing a false distinction, and of misunderstanding the nature ofVlastos’s position. Vlastos took Socrates to be attempting to prove moral truths, butthis search for moral truths is compatible with an attempt to reform his interlocutors’character. Why must examining his interlocutor’s moral beliefs and making someprogress toward constructing a moral view exclude Socrates’ reforming theircharacter? Moreover, if we are to do full justice to the repeated suggestion in Plato’searly dialogues that the arguments give Socrates, and not only his interlocutor, goodreason to accept the conclusions and act on them, we may do well to take seriously thesuggestion that Vlastos’s work has demonstrated the current philosophic signiµcanceof the Socratic elenchus as ‘our best hope for moral justiµcation in an imperfectworld’ (M. Nussbaum, Journal of Philosophy XCIV [1997], p. 37).Swarthmore College GRACE M. LEDBETTERdoi:10.1093/clrevj/bni237CRATYLUSD. S : Plato’s Cratylus. Pp. xii + 190. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003. Cased, £40, US$60. ISBN: 0-521-58492-2.Sedley begins by posing a question—‘Why did Plato write dialogues?’—andsuggesting an answer: because of a growing belief that conversation, in the form ofquestion and answer, is the structure of thought. Philosophical questioning andanswering may take place internally, in a single individual’s mind, or in conversationbetween individuals; Platonic question-and-answer sequences may be taken asdramatizations of Plato’s own thinking. S.’s reading of the Cratylus illustrates thisview of Platonic dialectic in detail. More particularly, S. shows how the Cratylus maybe taken to dramatize Plato’s sorting out mentally the two major components in hisintellectual make-up: the views of Cratylus, the µrst major in·uence on Plato, andthose of Socrates.S. also asks himself where the Cratylus µts into the overall chronology of Plato’scareer, answering ‘not in any one place’ (p. 7). S. places the ‘hard core of the dialogueas we have it’ (p. 14) not later than the middle of Plato’s middle period, but argues thatthere are traces of later revision, perhaps from about the time of composition of theSophist. Except for two passages which S. considers to belong properly to the originalThe Classical Review vol. 55 no. 2 © The Classical Association 2005; all rights reserved428   

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Review Of Does Socrates Have A Method? Rethinking The Elenchus In Plato\u27s Dialogues And Beyond Edited By G.A. Scott

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