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The quality of ατoπíα attributed by Alcibiades to Socrates in the Symposium is of greater interest than the usual renderings “strange character” or “odd behaviour” suggest. This article sees Alcibiades’ phrase in the light of his speech for Socrates as a whole.¹     

Teaching Political Science in China: Observations and Suggestions from a Foreign Visitor

Abstract

In responding to the other participants in the Symposium on Plato's Philosophers I attempt to clarify the reasons for, and the results of, my attempt to bring out the interrelations among the dialogues in order to determine what Plato thought. Recognizing that the indications of the dramatic dates of some the dialogues are controversial, I argue that the dates point to an over-arching narrative–the story of the rise, development, and limitations of Socratic philosophy. Plato uses his other philosophers—the Athenian Stranger, Parmenides, Timaeus, and the Eleatic Stranger—to bring out the problems that gave rise to Socratic philosophy and the limitations of his responses. Plato makes Socrates his “hero,” because Socrates provides the best account of the human beings who engage in the search for wisdom. By contrasting him with the other philosophers, Plato dramatizes the insoluble problems that make philosophy always a search for wisdom.     

Machiavelli: A Socratic?

Erica Benner and Leo Strauss have recently challenged the reigning consensus that, having concentrated on politics, Machiavelli was not a philosopher. Readers did not always consider Machiavelli's work to be unphilosophical; and whether a commentator considers Machiavelli to be a “philosopher” depends on his or her understanding of what a philosopher is. Neither Benner nor Strauss takes the activities and studies of professors of philosophy in universities today to be definitive. Instead, they look to an older tradition both describe as “Socratic.” Benner rests her argument primarily on Machiavelli's references to Xenophon, Plato, and Plutarch. Unfortunately, Machiavelli's references to the works of Xenophon and Plato do not include those that feature Socrates. Strauss points out the similarities between Socrates and Machiavelli's emphasis on the political and their appeal to the young, but he concludes that, although Machiavelli is a “political philosopher,” his use of philosophy to serve the desires of the demos means that he is not a “Socratic.”     

De Quelques présents latins

Plato and Xenophon ‐ contrary to Dover's interpretation of the Clouds ‐ provide the background to Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates: viewed against that background, Aristophanes’ jokes in the Clouds lose their obscurity, his comedy gains on poignancy and artistic unity; Plato's and Xenophon's Socrates regains historicity.     

Paul’s Euripides,Greek tragedy and Hebrew antiquity in Paradise Regain’d

ABSTRACT

The exchange between Satan and Jesus in Book IV of Paradise Regained is the first substantial account of tragedy in John Milton’s 1671 volume. In his response to Satan’s Athenian temptation, Jesus offers an alternative to the more familiar defence of tragedy in the preface to Samson Agonistes. Here, Jesus invokes the Hebrew prehistory of Attic tragedy, expanding Milton’s tragic archive beyond the antique Athenians themselves, drawing instead upon Clement of Alexandria and Socrates of Constantinople – both of whom support Milton’s idiosyncratic belief that Paul quoted Euripides at I Corinthians 15:33. And where Clement and Socrates support this tragic provenance, they also address the vexed relationship between Christian faith and heathen learning. Far from showing contempt for Athenian art or erudition, Milton invokes these Patristic sources to enable readers to locate Jesus’ critical response in a dynamic relationship to the relevant preface to Samson Agonistes.     

Homeric Resonances

Abstract

This “Homeric” appreciation of Catherine Zuckert's Plato's Philosophers focuses on the significance of the revised chronology for reading the Platonic dialogues and how this changes the conventional understanding of the relation between Plato and Socrates: Plato become Socrates' biographer, not his replacement.     

Waller R. Newell,Tyrants: A History of Power,Injustice, and Terror

Waller Newell's historical typology of tyrants looks even more interesting from the philosophical perspective of Plato's Gorgias. Socrates pinpoints a blind spot typical of the reformer tyrant in Gorgias, whose success depends on his personal, not his principled, influence. Polus, the garden-variety tyrant, wants to acquire more and more with impunity, an old story with the usual bad ending. Callicles pushes furthest of all: it's only the exceptional individual like himself who steels himself to follow ideology to the bitter end. The Socratic rejoinders do not persuade the interlocutors, but they might serve to educate liberal democrats: some tyrants are just incurable.     

Philosophy as an Art of Dying

This essay proposes a close look at the tradition of martyr-philosophers in the Western world (Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Edith Stein, Jan Pato?ka) and advances the claim that the death of these people has a distinct philosophical significance. For various reasons, these philosophers place themselves in limit-situations where they cannot use words anymore to express themselves, but have to turn their own flesh into a radical means of expression. Their dying thus becomes an extension of their work, and the image of their violent deaths comes to be regarded as an inseparable part of their heritage. First, I discuss Socrates as the founder of the tradition of “philosophical deaths” in the West; his gradual “taming” of death in Plato's Apology is discussed in some detail. I then introduce a modern case of “Socratic death,” that of Jan Pato?ka (1907–77). Finally, I map out the cultural and social mechanisms, as well as some of the phenomenological preconditions, presupposed by the notion of “philosophy as an art of dying.”     

On the Question of the Legacy of Leo Strauss

The question of the legacy of Leo Strauss, insofar as it is philosophically raised, deals not with what he had handed down, but with the mission he had undertaken. Philosophically, the question of the legacy of Leo Strauss is the question of his legation. That question takes its bearings from the question of the mission of Socrates, which, in turn, takes its bearings from the question of the “ladder of ascent” as set forth by Diotima. The rung of that ladder reached by Strauss is the question of his legacy, philosophically understood.     

The Concept of Reading: Kierkegaard,Irony, and Duality—A Response to Mark Cortes Favis

In a recent article in The European Legacy, Mark Cortes Favis argued that the figure of Kierkegaard expressed a tension between two aspects of writing—the Socratic and the Platonic. While Favis is correct to see a duality in Kierkegaard's writing, his article does not fully answer the problem of how we can account for our interpretation of this tension. Given that the duality within Kierkegaard's writing transgresses the boundaries of author and reader, we cannot easily circumscribe any claims on his writing without considering its effect on our reading. Rather, the characteristic duality of his authority manifests itself in a number of ways in the task of identifying the philosophical meaning of his texts. Kierkegaard's relationship to Socrates is thus symptomatic of a number of figural dualities that pervade interpretations of his work. By surveying the ways in which these interpretations draw on the axiom of duality in order to ascribe an authority to Kierkegaard's texts, I suggest Favis's argument that Kierkegaard's writing expresses both Socratic and Platonic aspects should be placed within the wider duality at work in the interpretation of Kierkegaard's work.     

Variety and Adventure in the Life of Carl Linden

Abstract

In his long life Carl Linden lived variously and wonderfully. For more than half a century he was a teacher and promoter of Great Books in the classroom and in the neighborhood. Great Books in his hands and mind transformed him into a kind of latter-day Socrates, always questioning, always smiling, sometimes teasingly. As a naturalist he was a hiker/biker on the C&O Canal towpath and promoter of it, as well. His scholarly pursuits took him to Eastern Europe, especially to Russia and Ukraine, about which he wrote and taught for four decades. Finally, he was a bon vivant whose Socratic ways won him laurels in the classroom and friends in the places where good fellows meet.     

Al-Fārābī’s Cave: Aristotle’s Logic and the Ways of Socrates and Thrasymachus

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric al-Fārābī harmonizes Plato and Aristotle in terms of philosophic education by ordering Aristotle’s eight logical works onto Plato’s famous image of the cave. He represents the way out of the cave with Aristotle’s four logical works of ascent (Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, and Posterior Analytics) and the return into the cave through Aristotle’s four logical works of the descent (Topics, Sophistical Refutations, Rhetoric, and Poetics). Al-Fārābī’s image of ascent and descent also alludes to Socrates’ conception of protreptic education in Book VII of the Republic. In essence, protreptic education consists in the Socratic art that freely turns the soul from the images and political interpretations of things to being itself. In this essay I argue that for al-Fārābī the four logical works of ascent guide the soul to free itself from its habituations so as to contemplate real beings, particularly the good of one’s own soul and the souls of one’s fellow citizens. Yet the ruler needs to use the arts of “descent,” as demonstrated by Thrasymachus, in order to rule the city well. The way of Socrates consists of the logical methods used to come to possess knowledge of being, while the way of Thrasymachus comprises the methods of persuasion to habituate citizens and protect the philosophic quest for the truth. Al-Fārābī, I conclude, combines the way of Socrates and the way of Thrasymachus in order to show that both ways are useful and necessary for good governance.     

A Revolution in Plato Scholarship

Abstract

Catherine Zuckert's new book on Plato is a monumental work that should revolutionize Plato scholarship. I argue that its principal claims about ordering Plato's dialogues according to their dramatic chronology and about the development of Socrates in relation to Plato's other philosophers are highly plausible and powerfully presented. The book also makes the case for Socrates as “Plato's hero” whose greatness lies in understanding the human realm of the noble and the good independently of cosmology or metaphysics; and it challenges us to ask if Plato and Catherine Zuckert embrace this model of Socratic philosophy as the highest and happiest way of life.     

孔子、苏格拉底思想比较研究

孔子和苏格拉底分别被誉为东西方的伦理学之父,作为轴心时代的文化英雄,他们的思想言行对后世产生了巨大的影响。本文就孔子对中国历史、伦理本位及注入式教学等的影响,苏格拉底对西方理性、平等、自由及启发式教学的影响等进行了比较研究,以期探讨当下人类面对的文化困境和生存危机。     

The Sublime Dissociation of the Past: Or How to Be(come) What One Is No Longer

Forgetting has rarely been investigated in historical theory. Insofar as it attracted the attention of theorists at all, forgetting has ordinarily been considered to be a defect in our relationship to the past that should be overcome in one way or another. The only exception is Nietzsche who so provocatively sung the praises of forgetting in his On the Use and Abuse of History (1874). But Nietzsche’s conception is the easy victim of a consistent historicism and therefore in need of correction. Four types of forgetting are identified in this essay. Central in the essay’s argument is the fourth type. This is the kind of forgetting taking place when a civilization “commits suicide” by exchanging a previous identity for a new one. Hegel’s moving account of the conflict between Socrates and the Athenian state is presented as the paradigmatic example of this kind of forgetting. Two conclusions follow from an analysis of this type of forgetting. First, we can now understand what should be recognized as a civilization’s historical sublime and how the notions of the historical sublime and of collective trauma are related. Second, it follows that myth and (scientific) history do not exclude each other; on the contrary, (scientific) history creates myth. This should not be taken to be a defect of history, for this is precisely how it should be.     

Two Theories of Toleration: Locke versus Mill

Abstract

In her book, Zuckert presents a new interpretation of the Platonic corpus based on the internal dramatic chronology of all the dialogues. According to Zuckert, once the dialogues are ordered in this way, then it is possible to understand Plato's story of the development of Socratic philosophy, especially in relation to the other non-Socratic philosophers: Parmenides, Timaeus, the Eleatic Stranger, and the Athenian Stranger. For Plato, Socratic philosophy is superior to these other types of philosophy because of its acute understanding of both the limitations and the erotic character of human knowledge. It is only with his account of erôs in the Symposium that Socrates was able to account for the ways in which the eternal and intelligible ideas of the noble, the just, and the good could come to be exemplified in the life of mortal human beings, via the cooperative practice of philosophic virtue.     

David Meetom: Interpreting,Power and the Risks of Intermediation in the Initial Phase of German Colonial Rule in Cameroon

ABSTRACT

David Meetom, a Duala subchief, was an important interpreter in the coastal region of Cameroon at the beginning of German rule, which was shaped by colonial officials’ lack of language skills, the colonial state’s low level of institutionalisation, its necessity to rely on intermediaries, and tensions within Duala society. In this circumstances, new opportunities opened up to those who had knowledge of a colonial language. The article examines Meetom’s actions as an interpreter, broker and intermediary between colonial and African languages, authorities and interests. It covers his actions from his informal participation in negotiations between African and German authorities, to his work as official government interpreter, to a trial in which he was accused of having exceeded his authority before finally being shot fleeing German authorities. For Meetom, the consequences of his intermediary position veered between being personally advantageous and disadvantageous. His work held potential for conflict, both with the colonial government and with the Duala or other African groups in the region. Meetom’s life serves to illustrate how interpreters facilitated and controlled contact between colonisers and Africans and proves the distinction between the colonisers and the colonised which underlay the concept of colonial rule as having been surprisingly fragile.     

Alarm Bells from the Past: The Troubling History of American Military Commissions

Among the most controversial of President George W. Bush's responses to the deadly September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was his issuance two months later of an order authorizing the trial before military commissions of aliens suspected of membership in that murderous organization or of involvement in terrorist activities. ¹ Two years after Bush's promulgation of that November 13, 2001 military order, no terrorist has yet stood trial before such a tribunal. That is not a bad thing. The history of American military commissions suggests that this is a legal device vulnerable to abuse that should be used only with the utmost caution.