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Book Reviews Gregory Vlastos. Socrates, lronist and Moral Philosopher. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 334. Cloth, $57.5o. Paper, $16.95. That Vlastos is praised for raising Socratic scholarship to a level of excellence never enjoyed before he jettisoned a manuscript, forty years ago, answering current questions about Socrates but missing his strangeness, is not as startling as first appears. For what emerged from that sacrifice was a philosophical warrior, precociously dedicated not only to scholarship but to Socrates. And even though Vlastos's standards are now more commmonplace, one still recaptures a bit of his fire in a scrupulouschapter on Socratic piety, in which he calls to account recalcitrant colleagues for refusing to face awkward facts about Socrates. For it is not Vlastos who is embarrassed by Socrates' penchant for the supernatural; nor is he distressed by Socrates' philosophizing not as a professional but an amateur, on the streets of Athens, in response to divine commands issued through dreams. Such facts, curiously at odds with our domesticated rationalist, do not make Socrates philosophically odd. There is no conflict between Socrates' dedication to divine directive and his insistence upon constantly testing what is revealed with human reason. Nor was Vlastos launched on his forty-year odyssey by that out of place (atopos) oddness which led Alcibiades in a panegyric on Socrates to spurn comparing him with mortal heroes. For logicians are rarely shaken up by spatial jolts as humorously set up by poets like Aristophanes, who had exhibited Socrates, out of place, in the air, looking down upon mortals and priding himself upon that immortal element, thereby not only marking his absolute difference but his hubr/s--unless Plato had quite seriously chosen Alcibiades' unearthly analogies as a foil to that hilarious oddness which Aristophanes had set out to vilify. That the paradox which provoked Vlastos's intellectual journey is not the Greek heroic paradox which poets, unable to forget the contrast between mortal and immortal , perpetuate by encouraging their heroes to act as though the stuff of which they have been made is stern and immortal, might best be clarified by going through the Various senses of "paradox" already employed. That is to say, it is not what is contrary to common opinion, or etymologically odd, that puzzled Vlastos. Nor was he distressed by that out-of-place oddness that so frustrated Alcibiades. What made Vlastos anxious were the following self-referential paradoxes in Plato. How can Socrates say that he knows nothing and yet conduct his own affairs with that steady sort of moral vision which allows him to refute all comers and behave in ways which belie what he disavows? How can Socrates disclaim teaching others and [1~5] le6 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:I JANUARY 1993 reputedly be the best teacher in Athens? Or how is one to understand Socrates as not engaging in politics when his conversations produce the most virtuous citizens? It is the self-referential difficulty inherent in such assertions which provides the best way of tracking Vlastos as he unpacks such paradoxes. But what must be noted, together with the centrality of the epistemological puzzle, is Vlastos's entry into Platonic studies not through the portals of the fifth century but through the reflections of later Hellenists, who were first to single out Socrates' claim to know nothing and then ask how he could know even that. Differently put, what Vlastos reports, in an invaluable first chapter, is how he was unable to resolve his anxiety until he rejected the Socrates of the Skeptics. When he did that, the contradictions could be explained away by speaking of two sorts of Socratic knowledge. It was from the perspective of Academic Skepticism, then, that Vlastos first sensed how to take the philosophical propositions in Plato's earlier texts seriously, i.e., how they could be singled out, numbered, and tested for deductive consistency. It was as if what could be removed from Plato's earlier texts were the philosophical fragments of Socrates. But can Socrates be surgically separated from Plato, by treating the sentences he is overheard speaking as "statements" or "propositions" testifying to his knowledge, method, or beliefs...

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