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Book Reviews Francesco Sarri. Socrate e ia genesi storica dell'idea occidentale di anima. Collana di Filosofia Antica, 3. Rome: ABETE, 1975. 2 vols. Pp. 211,216. L. 6,000. The main lines of the twentieth-century debate concerning the "Socratic question" are well known. On one side in the controversy, scholars such as Burnet and Taylor held that Plato was little more than a reporter faithfully setting down the thoughts of his master; a consequence of this view was that we could know a good deal about Socrates. On the other side, skeptics such as Gigon and Dupr6el argued that Plato's dialogues created a fictitious Socrates and consequently give us no information about the historical figure. The weight of scholarly opinion now seems to have come down squarely in the middle, as it often does in such disputes, avoiding either extreme. So, for example, I. G. Kidd in the article "Socrates" in the prestigious Encyclopedia of Philosophy rejects the views both of the skeptics and of writers such as Burnet and Taylor and claims that there is good reason to accept some of the Socratic data in Plato as authentic, though surely not all of it. Yet this middle way is not as safe as it might have seemed; it has its pitfalls. We see Kidd claiming to have such fine discernment as to be able, from the short space of one page from the Phaedo, to accept as genuine Socrates' intellectual biography and to reject as non-Socratic the theory of Forms that is closely associated with that biography. One wonders what the basis for this discernment is; if there is none, the accepting and rejecting turns out to be gratuitous. To put skepticism about Socrates to rest by establishing something significant about his philosophy while at the same time avoiding gratuitous claims has been Sarri's aim in the present work. The author considers the Burnet-Tayior claims about Socrates and disentangles a pair of theses" (1) Socrates is responsible for introducing a new concept of the soul into Greek thought; (2) the Socrates of Plato is the Socrates of history. Sarri rejects 2 at once, deciding wisely that there is no need to beat that dead horse. But as far as I is concerned, Sarri accepts it and sets out to construct a proof for it. The method he follows is to examine the uses of the word psyche in writings that date back before the time of Socrates (the epic poets, the Orphics, the philosophers), writings from his contemporaries (Democritus, the Sophists, Aristophanes ), and from the period immediately following his death (Plato, Xenophon, the minor Socratics, and the Attic orators). On the basis of his examination of this data, Sarri concludes that there was a radical change in the concept of the soul, and that this change took place between 430 or so and 399 R.c., the date of Socrates' death. Clearly someone else was responsible for this change, or else Socrates was. But, Sarri contends, it is unlikely that anyone would have brought about this change and yet have remained unknown. In addition, the evidence from Aristophanes, Plato, Xenophon, and the minor Socratics links this change with the name of Socrates. Socrates, therefore, did indeed introduce this new concept. And if Sarri's arguments stand up, we not only are assured that Socrates introduced the concept, but we can as well determine at least the main features of it. In order, then, to back up his claim that Socrates was responsible for this new concept as well as to clarify what contribution can with some certainty be attributed to him, Sarri first traces the traditional ideas of the soul as these are reflected in Homer and in Orphism. Sarri agrees with the conclusion Rohde came to with regard to the Homeric view of the soul according to which man is alive, conscious, and intelligently active "only so long as the psyche remains within him. But it is not the psyche which communicates its own faculties to man and gives him capacity for life together with consciousness, will and knowledge. It is rather that during the union of the psyche and the body...

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