Schlosser, Joel A.

English

Scholarship;  Research;  and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College

Bryn Mawr College
Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr
College
Political Science Faculty Research and Scholarship Political Science
2016
The Socratic Turn: Knowledge of Good and Evil in
an Age of Science
Joel A. Schlosser
Bryn Mawr College, jschlosser@brynmawr.edu
Let us know how access to this document benefits you.
Follow this and additional works at: http://repository.brynmawr.edu/polisci_pubs
Part of the Political Science Commons
This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. http://repository.brynmawr.edu/polisci_pubs/34
For more information, please contact repository@brynmawr.edu.
Custom Citation
Schlosser, Joel A. "The Socratic Turn: Knowledge of Good and Evil in an Age of Science." Perspectives on Politics 14.3: 868-869.
 1 
Dustin Sebell, The Socratic Turn: Knowledge of Good and Evil in an Age of 
Science (University of Pennsylvania, 2016) 
 
Review by Joel Alden Schlosser, Bryn Mawr College 
 
 
Dustin Sebell’s The Socratic Turn begins by both defending and attacking political 
theory. On the one hand, Sebell takes the side of political theory against its more 
scientifically-minded colleagues, suggesting the importance of political theory as a 
potential science on its own terms. Yet on the other hand, Sebell asserts that political 
theory has failed in an essential way by relinquishing inquiry into “values,” agreeing with 
empiricists that facts must stand apart as the proper subject of political inquiry. This 
promising, if paradoxical, overture to The Socratic Turn leads Sebell back to the figure 
who occupies the entirety of Sebell’s book: Socrates, the “founder of political 
philosophy” who famously turned from an early interest in natural science to inquiry 
about justice pursued among his fellow Athenians. Sebell focuses his monograph almost 
exclusively on the five Stephanus pages of Plato’s Phaedo in which Socrates describes 
his intellectual development (roughly 96a – 100e). This concentrated attention allows 
Sebell to work through the text with extremely fine-grained detail. The conventional 
account of the Socratic Turn generally follows Cicero’s poetic rendition: philosophy once 
dealt with phenomena of the natural world; Socrates distinguished himself by calling 
philosophy down from the heavens into the polis. Cicero’s description ostensibly comes 
from Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates describes what appears as a two stage process: 
Socrates was initially keen on the wisdom of natural science but then found these lacking; 
this disappointment turned Socrates to investigate human opinions about the good and the 
beautiful. Sebell’s analysis does not displace this conventional story but complicates it in 
three parts: highlighting the limits of natural science in giving an account of its basic 
categories; showing the difficulty of scientific teleology (and teleology in toto); and 
elaborating the necessity of the Socratic Turn to examining opinions about justice in light 
of the limits of natural science. For Sebell, this step-by-step approach to Socrates’ 
intellectual development (as described in the Phaedo) shows the error of separating 
political science from political philosophy and the urgency of returning to something like 
the Socratic project. 
 
Sebell first turns to the problems young Socrates discovered in natural science. 
Materialistic natural science attempts to confirm that nothing can come without a cause. 
This approach fails, however, when one inquires about ultimate causes. The 
heterogeneity of the world, in particular its distinct classes and kinds of beings, is, in 
Sebell’s words, “demonstrably noetic in origin” (13). In other words, Socrates’ 
investigations lead him to see the primacy of form for an account of the causes of the 
world. Yet this form is separate from the material things under investigation. Something 
immaterial appears to put together distinct beings from separate parts, to count or 
calculate. “Only a mind can do this” (69). 
 
The turn to mind brings Socrates to the question of teleology. Anaxagoras, on Socrates’ 
account, had argued that “in fact mind (nous) is both the orderer and the cause of all 
 2 
things” (97b8-c2; 75). Natural science had promised a teleological account of the 
universe, that things came to be to serve a final cause. Yet Anaxagoras’s account, as 
Socrates investigates it, prompts skepticism about this assumption. The materialistic 
approach of understanding beings “from below” failed but so too does the teleological 
approach of understanding beings “from above”: teleology still relies on assumptions 
about the nature of things, namely that they follow an order of the mind (83); when 
Socrates takes this account to the nature of the good, however, Anaxagoras’s account 
cannot show how nous constitutes particulars. The search for the cause of the whole, a 
search that animated the young Socrates’ first investigations, ends in failure. 
 
The failure of natural science to respond to Socrates’ desire to know the causes of the 
whole prompts the Socratic Turn. Socrates’ “second sailing” begins from the insight that 
the accounts of natural science preempt choice; the accounts of the natural scientists, 
therefore, come into conflict with the idea that human beings can choose to be just. 
People living in society must examine their opinions about justice – they must figure out 
how, in Josiah Ober’s words, to go on together – and natural science does not help here. 
Yet the mode of questioning with which Socrates began and which led Socrates to see the 
inadequacies of natural science also shapes the path upon which Socrates embarks with 
the his turn. Seeking to uncover contradictions within definitions or hypotheses, a task 
that Socrates first pursued with respect to natural science, forms the substance of the 
dialectical approach that Socrates now brings to human opinions.  
 
While The Socratic Turn does not detour in any radical way from the conventional 
account of Socrates’ development, it evinces a distinctive appreciation of how Socrates’ 
interest in natural science not only leads to his turn but shapes what follows. Socrates 
does not begin with abstract questions. Rather he turns to natural science out of a desire 
to know how to live; natural science does not satisfy these inquiries and indeed shows 
itself as presupposing certain unreflective answers to them. Hence Socrates must sail 
again, this time pulled by his own oars rather than the winds of the contemporary 
scientific movement around him. This second sailing marks the beginning of political 
philosophy yet the inquiry into causes and forms persists. Sebell suggests how separating 
political philosophy from political science fails to recognize the primacy of the former for 
negotiating political life itself. 
 
Whether or not one finds this argument convincing will depend on a set of commitments 
that Sebell does not directly address. First, Sebell assumes that Socrates is a 
“philosopher” dedicated to imparting “teachings” to his benighted interlocutors. Second, 
Sebell assumes that a contemporary reader can understand these teachings through a 
“close reading” of Plato’s dialogues, one that foregrounds the text and relegates issues of 
language, dramatic situation, the place of a dialogue within Plato’s corpus, debates about 
the historical Socrates, genre, and audience to the footnotes or oblivion. Third, Sebell 
assumes an essential continuity between Socrates’ project of “political philosophy” and 
political theory as practiced today. Not defending (or even elaborating) these 
commitments means Sebell ignores many vital and interesting discussions in ancient 
political thought. I have serious questions about each one of these assumptions, but for 
the sake of space let me briefly address the final one.  
 3 
 
Sebell begins his book with the provocative promise that political theorists can learn 
something important about their projects by examining the Socratic Turn. Sebell never 
states directly how his analysis would translate to the work of political theory today, but I 
would argue that Socrates’ importance lies less in his intellectual autobiography than in 
the practice of philosophy that he carried out among his fellow citizens and non-citizens, 
a practice best characterized not in terms of teachings or doctrines but rather as 
aggressive and collaborative inquiry animated by erotic desire for wisdom that most 
Athenians found deeply disturbing of collective life. Sebell seems to think political 
scientists would best follow Socrates by accounting for the intellectual foundations of our 
research, but given that Socrates denied instructing anyone and never wrote anything 
down, I would counter that the most Socratic figures today pursue philosophy elsewhere 
– not among academic political theorists, but on street corners and in chat rooms, raising 
fundamental questions in disruptive and radical ways studies such as this one have yet to 
attend. 


The Socratic Turn: Knowledge of Good and Evil in an Age of Science

https://repository.brynmawr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1034&amp;context=polisci_pubs

The Socratic Turn: Knowledge of Good and Evil in an Age of Science

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Scholarship; Research; and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College