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Piety and Justice: Plato's ‘Euthyphro’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Frederick Rosen
Frederick Rosen
Affiliation:
Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
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Extract

Piety is not a theme that normally attracts the modern mind. In our own age rebellion has a more prominent position and the theme of impiety strikes a more sympathetic note. We are led to examine Plato's Euthyphro as much for the hints we find on the subject of impiety as for whatever it might contain on the seemingly drab subject of the holy. The Euthyphro is also a dialogue concerned with justice, a recurrent theme in the Platonic corpus, and it questions the accepted relationship of justice to piety and orthodoxy. The secular implications of the argument, which seem to be the more important to Socrates, himself, are as relevant to modern politics and religion as they were to the life of ancient Athens.

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Type
Articles
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Philosophy , Volume 43 , Issue 164 , April 1968, pp. 105 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1968

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References

1 See Klein, Jacob, A Commentary on Plato's Meno (Chapel Hill: 1965), pp. 3–31.Google Scholar References to the text of the Euthyphro appear in parenthesis in the essay, and the text utilised throughout is the Loeb edition.

2 Plato, , Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, and Crito, ed. Burnet, John (Oxford: 1960), 8.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., p. 25.

4 Ibid.

5 Hoerber, Robert G., ‘Plato's Euthyphro’, Phronesis, III (1958), 97.Google Scholar

6 Ibid., p. 98. Taylor, A. E., Plato (London, 7th ed.: 1960), pp. 146–147.Google Scholar

7 Hoerber, , p. 97.Google Scholar

8 Taylor, , p. 146.Google ScholarPlato, , Cratylus, 407D.Google Scholar

9 Anastaplo, George, ‘Human Being and Citizen: A Beginning to the Study of Plato's “Apology of Socrates”’, Ancients and Moderns, ed. Cropsey, J. (New York: 1964), 47.Google Scholar

10 See Klein, passim.

11 See Shorey, Paul, What Piato Said (Chicago: 1933), 75.Google Scholar

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17 Ibid.

18 W. Gerson Rabinowitz rightly emphasises the tendency in Platonic dialogues where there is an interlude for the positive teaching to follow the interlude. ‘Platonic Piety: An Essay Toward the Solution of an Enigma’, Phronesis, III (1958), 114.Google Scholar

19 Hoerber has shown that if Euthyphro retained his original definition that piety is what is loved by the gods, no problem of causation would have arisen, and Socrates' argument would have been of a ‘straw-man’ type, pp. 102–104.Google Scholar

20 Taylor, , p. 155Google Scholar, Shorey, , p. 78.Google Scholar

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