The Guardians on Trial: The Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues from Euthyphro to Phaedo

638 Pages·2016·4.85 MB·English

by  William H. F. Altman

The Guardians on Trial
The Guardians on Trial

The Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues
from Euthyphro to Phaedo

William H. F. Altman

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Altman, William H. F., 1955- author.
Title: The guardians on trial : the reading order of Plato's Dialogues from
Euthyphro to Phaedo / William H. F. Altman.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016007531 (print) | LCCN 2016008540 (ebook) | ISBN
9781498529518 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781498529525 (Electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: Plato. Dialogues.
Classification: LCC B395 .A555 2016 (print) | LCC B395 (ebook) | DDC 184--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016007531

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information
Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America
in memoriam

Juan Roura-Parella (1897-1983)

who hammered into my head
the truth about Parmenides
And thus among those things that would lead our thought toward the
vision of what is would be the study of the One [ἡ περὶ τὸ ἓν μάθησις].

Republic 525a1-2

Don’t move the immovables [μὴ κινεῖν τὰ ἀκίνητα].

Laws 684e1; cf. 842e9-843a1, and 913b9

“The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

And is not this true of the good [τὸ ἀγαθόν] likewise: that the man who
is unable to define [διορίζεσθαι] in his discourse [λόγος], abstracting
[ἀφαιρεῖν] from all other things [τὰ ἄλλα πάντα] the idea of the good [ἡ
τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἰδέα], and who cannot, as if in battle [ὥσπερ ἐν μάχῃ],
through all refutations [ἔλεγχοι] emerging, not eager to refute
[προθυμούμενος ἐλέγχειν] by recourse to opinion [δόξα] but to being
[οὐσία], proceeding throughout in all of these with the discourse [ὁ
λόγος] un-toppled—the man who lacks this power, you will say, does
not really know the good itself [αὐτὸ τὸ ἀγαθόν] or any other good, but
that if he joins himself [ἐφάπτεσθαι] in any way to some image
[εἴδωλον], he does so [ἐφάπτεσθαι again] by reputation [δόξα] but not
knowledge [ἐπιστήμη], dreaming [ὀνειροπολεῖν] and dozing through
his present life, and before he awakens [ἐξεγείρειν] here, he will arrive
at the house of Hades and fall asleep for ever?

Republic 534b8-d1

Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Preface: The Reading Order of Plato’s Dialogues from Euthyphro to Phaedo xi

Introduction: The Guardians on Trial 1

1 The Beginning of the End: Euthyphro 17-67

§1. “The Great Parmenides” 17
§2. Piety and Parricide 34

2 Plato’s Trilogy: Sophist, Statesman, and Apology of Socrates 69-169

§3. The Image of the Philosopher in Sophist 69
§4. The Sophist in Plato’s Statesman 111
§5. Apology of Socrates as Plato’s Philosopher 148

3 Hipparchus-Minos: Conversing with the Weeping Jailor 171-208

§6. Reading Order and Authenticity 171
§7. Basanistic Pedagogy in Plato’s Hipparchus 188
§8. Plato’s Minos: The Snuggest Fit of All 201

4 Crito-Laws-Epinomis: Socrates vs. the Athenian Stranger 209-325

§9. Achilles in Athens 209
§10. The Athenian Stranger as “Socrates” in Flight 231
§11. The Theological-Political coup d’etat of Laws 13 254
§12. Halfway Toward Epinomis: Reading Laws 7 277
§13. A Tale of Two Drinking Parties 312

5 The Immortal Phaedo 327-456

§14. Putting Cosmology in Its Place 327
§15. Cratylus Revisited: αἰθήρ, Hades, and Apollo 358
§16. Immortality and the Intermediates: Purification vs. Proof 374
§17. Justice as Cause: The Argument of the Action 420
§18. Before Protagoras 435

Bibliography 457
vii
viii Contents

Index 485

Index verborum 583
Index locorum 593

About the Author 613
Acknowledgements

In the spring of 1976, Juan Roura-Parella, by then a professor emeritus of Ro-
mance Languages at Wesleyan University and almost eighty, offered a course
called “Art Style and World-view,” the thesis of which, roughly, was that Mod-
ern Art had revived Presocratic philosophy. Roura-Parella applied the same
question to each of the ancient thinkers, posed in a marvelously ungrammatical
English, and spoken with a strong Catalonian accent: “Who exist? Who is the
Being?” What made this funnier was that he pronounced “the Being” as “dee
Bean,” and it would be fair to say that an imitation of him became in later years
a frequent theme for laughter. Although Mr. Forsyth had explained to me in
tenth grade that “true words are often spoken between false teeth,” there was
little evidence that this lesson had been learned by the humorist who used
Roura-Parella’s version of Parmenides’s answer, in particular, as a punch-line:
“Be’an exist; Be’an is dee Bean.” Particularly laughable, both to me and to my
audience, was the fact that he always prefaced this tautological solecism with
the very same words: “very, very, very, great man, Parmenides; Plato call him:
‘dee great Parmenides.’” Finding little evidence of this “great Parmenides” in
the dialogues as I was taught them in college or university—including Parmeni-
des itself—these well-remembered words were nothing but a joke until the mo-
ment, decades later, when the thought occurred to me that Timaeus was Plato’s
version of his great teacher’s “Way of Opinion.” It turns out that Roura-Parella
had, like Socrates before him, left his stinger behind, and were it not for him,
this improbable notion could never “of a sudden take such hold”; it is therefore
to the cherished memory of this humane, inspiring, and brilliant European intel-
lectual—more at home in German than in English—that I dedicate this book.
I have many others to thank, beginning with those closest to this project in a
physical sense. To the professionals at Rowman & Littlefield and also to the
professional readers they found to review and write endorsements, I owe more
than I can say; thanks in particular to Jana Hodges-Kluck, Rachel Weydert,
Laura Chappell, and Joseph Parry, along with Richard Foley, Christopher Long,
Avi Mintz, and Anne-Marie Schultz. Others who were kind enough to read and
comment are Alfonso Flórez, Topher Kurfess, Lidia Palumbo, and Michael
Wiitala. As always, I am also grateful to Mitch Miller and Roslyn Weiss, for
their ongoing support and encouragement. Noburo Notomi was also very kind
to me, and others in the academy I need to thank are Kathy Eden, Leonardo

ix