This collection of 30 essays on the doctrines and figure of Socrates, virtually all of them new and unpublished elsewhere, is organised chronologically in two parts and five sections. My review centres on the nineteen essays in the first part, ‘Socrates in Antiquity’. The second part, ‘Socrates after Antiquity’, includes essays on how Socrates was taken up by Arabic philosophy, in the Italian Renaissance and in early modern France; by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Hermeneutics; by psychoanalysis and Lacan; and one on the Socratic method from grade school to law school.
The editors' introduction explains that a variety of inspirations guided them in selecting topics. The strongest is Vlastos' work on Socrates. C. Rowe is the most concerned to take up the Socratic question. He regards Vlastos' division between early and middle dialogues as ‘no longer sustainable’ (p. 169 n. 1) and raises many doubts about the standard version of the developmentalist thesis. He concludes that Plato's philosophy is thoroughly Socratic and offers his ‘guess’ that Platonic theory in the dialogues is that of the historical Socrates. At the end of the volume H. Ausland's interesting essay surveys the last two centuries of scholarship on Socrates, and includes a brief characterisation of Vlastos' work as a whole (pp. 504–6); but with this one partial exception, the essays inspired by Vlastos are about Socrates, not Vlastos.
A particularly strong essay by G. Rudebusch articulates explicit and implicit theories of love in the Lysis, and defends this account against criticisms both contemporary (it is too crude, thought Vlastos) and ancient (it overlooks equality friendship, held Aristotle). He also suggests that Socrates' unconventional account of love was ‘the main reason he was found guilty and sentenced to death on the charge of corrupting the young’ (p. 186). He does not square the account in the Lysis with later accounts, because these are ‘more Platonic than Socratic’ (p. 187). Other contributions touch indirectly on Socratic eros: T. Brennan's essay on Stoicism offers an admittedly speculative claim that Socratic irony might stem from spite over his lacking an erastes as a young man, and D. McLean looks at how the figure of Socrates was interpreted in early modern France.
Though not mentioned by the editors as an explicit influence, the presence of P. Vander Waert's The Socratic Movement and G. Giannantoni's Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae is felt throughout the essays of section 1. L. Dorian's essay stands out for its compelling presentation of Xenophon's Socrates as a philosopher in his own right, one who practises an identifiable and doctrinally-supported way of life that differs from the strangeness and doctrinal disunity of Plato's Socrates. After a succinct account of the divergence of Xenophon's and Plato's Socrates, he shows the fundamental role played in Xenophon of enkrateia, and compares it to the role played in Plato by sophia. P. Woodruff compares and contrasts Socrates and the Sophists with an excellent nine-point list, which would be useful to consult in lower-level courses, and yet is informative and controversial enough to stimulate discussion elsewhere. D. Nails offers a fresh discussion of Socrates' trial, blending discussions of historical context and contemporary scholarship with the novel device of examining the five Platonic dialogues that portray the days immediately before, during and after the trial.
The result of the wide reservoir of diverse influences is that some essays cover the same broad topic area and can productively disagree with one another. Consider the three essays on Socrates' religious beliefs or practices. R. Janko brings his work on the Derveni Papyrus to bear on the question of what climate existed for Socrates' own ‘freethinking’ on spiritual matters. He sees a reformation, counter-reformation dialectic at work. A. Long's essay argues in favour of the compatibility of Socrates' divine sign and his reliance on reason. It is novel in that it uses Plutarch to set out various conceptual materials for thinking about the content of the experience of the sign, and reminds us that the sign's divinity rested not in its universalisability but in its reliability for Socrates. Long mistakenly holds that the sign must have ‘sufficient semantic content’ that its indications could be represented ‘in ordinary language’ (p. 65); this may be the essence of rationality, but it is not a necessary condition of the sign's content if Socrates' obedience to it is to be rational. Finally, J. Bussanich offers a wide-ranging essay arguing that Plato ‘expresses his religious experience and faith in the divine through the character of Socrates’ (p. 200). This Socrates is a ‘visionary’ (p. 200), a refashioned Orphic–Pythagorean divine man (p. 212), who ‘exemplifies the Apollonian prophetic and purificatory functions’ (p. 203). Pace Vlastos and M. McPherran, Socrates' religious experiences do not stand in need of rational justification, nor do Plato's dialogues record such efforts, but they are ‘self-authenticating’ (p. 207) and ‘provide dialectical starting-points and specify his existential goals’ (p. 200). For Bussanich, rationality and argument purify the soul and make nondiscursive grasp of truth possible.
Several essays that take up Socrates' methods and aims implicitly disagree with Bussannich. In a characteristically clear and well-written piece, R. Kraut offers an illuminating interpretation and defence of Socrates' challenge to live the examined life. It includes a succinct defence of developmentalism and of the view that the early dialogues should be thought of as containing Socrates' view. It also compares and contrasts Socrates' views with modern moral theory, and settles on the claim that Socrates believes each of us has a duty to philosophise, where for Plato, most of us should obey the select few who are capable of philosophising. R. Weiss's essay also discusses Socrates' commitment to examination of himself and others, and tries to distinguish three dimensions of his philosophising – exhortation, refutation and examination. Even as she concedes that the first two are forms of the third (p. 247), she notes differences between them and paints a picture of a Socrates rather less in need of persistent examination than he says he is in the Apology. H. Tarrant orients readers well to the literature on Socrates' method. He argues that Socrates' method is both personal and truth-seeking, that it ‘aims at both epistemological and moral advances’, for others and himself (p. 255). He catalogues several instances of elenchein and shows that it is normally the person, not the statement, that is refuted; the ‘elenchos tests claims’ but ‘these claims remain firmly linked with people’ (p. 259).
Brennan's essay also expresses views about the Socratic method. It is one of two essays on Stoicism – three if you count S. Prince's comprehensive effort to discern the Socratic elements in Antisthenes' philosophy, the moral philosophy of which Stoicism ‘inherited and developed’ (p. 90). Brennan examines the similarities between Epictetus and Socrates, while E. Brown looks at the overall reception of Socrates by the Stoics. Brown's artful and clear essay proposes that Stoic reflection on Socrates' way of life generates at least four important paradoxical doctrines. He concludes with some of the ways that the Stoics did not embrace Socrates: his reckless dialectical examinations of anyone, his belief that the philosophical life is exclusive of other pursuits in life, and his focus on ethics and neglect of physics and logic.
The Companion is a wide-ranging, stimulating and affordable collection that will be enjoyed by specialists and used in the classroom. Part 2, ‘Socrates After Antiquity’, makes the volume distinctive amongst similar handbooks and companions, giving it the historical scope of M. Trapp's two-volume collection on Socrates (2007). All Greek is transliterated and there is an extensive index, but no index locorum. Bibliographies, a few of them annotated, are provided at the end of almost every essay.
