Aristotle, the Socratic. Some Limits of Aristotle’s Review on Socratic Intellectualism

Eidos ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 40-67
Author(s):  
Esteban Bieda
Keyword(s):  
Socratic Intellectualism

Self-Mastery, Piety, and Reciprocity in Xenophon’s Ethics

2020 ◽  
pp. 412-431
Author(s):  
David M. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Central Factor ◽  
The World ◽  
The Face ◽  
Socratic Intellectualism

“Self-Mastery, Piety, and Reciprocity in Xenophon’s Ethics” focuses on the following aspects of Xenophon’s ethics. Xenophon’s interest in leadership makes ethics a central concern across his wide-ranging body of work. The foundation of virtue, for Xenophon, is enkrateia (self-mastery), which he believed could be squared with Socratic intellectualism as it was required both for the acquisition of knowledge and for the successful application of knowledge in the face of non-intellectual drives. Xenophon’s famous piety is also of ethical import, as he argues that the gods designed the world to our benefit, benefit the pious through divination, and established unwritten laws which should regulate our conduct. Among those laws is one rewarding reciprocity, which is the central factor in successful interpersonal relationships and friendship. Xenophon, despite his emphasis on self-mastery, believed that the best life was also the most pleasant life, though he also distinguished between pleasures.

Commentary On Van Den Berg

2013 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 232-237
Author(s):  
Gary Gabor
Keyword(s):  
Self Psychology ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Full Stop ◽  
Socratic Intellectualism

I agree with Robbert Van den Berg that Plotinus endorses Socratic intellectualism, but I challenge his view that Plotinus rejects the phenomenon of akrasia. According to Van den Berg, the only form of akrasia acknowledged by Plotinus is a conditional, or ‘weak,’ akrasia. I provide some reasons for thinking that Plotinus might have accepted complete or ‘strong’ akrasia—full stop. While such strong forms of akrasia are usually taken to conflict with Socratic intellectualism, I argue that Plotinus’s complex, dual-self psychology allows a way in which he, unique among ancient philosophers (and perhaps any thinker in the history of philosophy), could simultaneously endorse Socratic intellectualism and hard akrasia.

Some Central Elements of Socratic Political Theory

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 27-40
Author(s):  
Donald Morrison
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Value Theory ◽  
The Core ◽  
Central Elements ◽  
Socratic Intellectualism ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Dimensions Of Variation

The fundamental concepts of Socratic political theory are statesmanship or the art of politics, and the good of the city. Important scholars have denied that, on Socrates’ view, statesmanship as such is possible. But Socratic intellectualism does not commit him to the view that the methods of politics, such as legislation and punishment, are useless. The Socratic tradition in political theory is rich and varied. Among the dimensions of variation are: the relationship between statesmanship and other arts of rule; what are the limits of reasonable human ambition; and the relationship between the well-being of the city and the well-being of its parts. At the core of Socratic moral and political theory is a commitment to choose what is truly good. Varieties of Socratic value theory arise from the different ways in which this commitment is interpreted, and the range of realms to which it is applied.

Plato's Moral Psychology

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachana Kamtekar
Keyword(s):  
Moral Psychology ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Motivation ◽  
The Core ◽  
Living Well ◽  
Socratic Intellectualism ◽  
Set Up

Plato’s Moral Psychology is concerned with Plato’s account of the soul insofar as it bears on our living well or badly, virtuously or viciously. The core of Plato’s moral psychology is his account of human motivation, and PMP argues that throughout the dialogues Plato maintains that human beings have a natural desire for our own good, and that actions and conditions contrary to this desire are involuntary (from which follows the ‘Socratic paradox’ that wrongdoing is involuntary). Our natural desire for our own good may be manifested in different ways: by our pursuit of what we calculate is best, but also by our pursuit of pleasant or fine things—pursuits which Plato assigns to distinct parts of the soul, sometimes treating these soul-parts as homuncular sub-agents to facilitate psychic management, and other times providing a natural teleological account for them. Thus PMP develops a very different interpretation of Plato’s moral psychology from the mainstream interpretation, according to which Plato first proposes that human beings only do what we believe to be the best of the things we can do (‘Socratic intellectualism’) and then in the middle dialogues rejects this in favour of the view that the soul is divided into parts with good-dependent and good-independent motivations (‘the divided soul’). PMP arrives at its different interpretation through the methodology of reading dialogues with a close eye to the dialectical dependence of what the main speaker says on the precise intellectual problem set up between himself and his interlocutors.

Two Interpretations of Socratic Intellectualism

2015 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Blackson ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Socratic Intellectualism

Alcibiades’ Akrasia: Reason for Wrongdoing?

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-152
Author(s):  
Colm Shanahan
Keyword(s):  
Prior Knowledge ◽  
Negative Reaction ◽  
Good Will ◽  
Rational Freedom ◽  
Greater Good ◽  
Socratic Intellectualism

Abstract I will argue that, due to the level of attention given to comparing and contrasting Socratic Intellectualism with the Republic, the question of the possibility of akrasia in Plato’s thought has not yet been adequately formulated. I will instead be focusing on Plato’s Symposium, situating Alcibiades at its epicentre and suggesting that his case should be read as highlighting some of Plato’s concerns with Socratic Intellectualism. These concerns arise from the following position of Socratic Intellectualism: knowing the greater good will necessarily entail doing good, and will thereby remove the motivational content of prior knowledge of what is good. Through Alcibiades, Plato explores the possibility of a negative reaction to knowledge of the greater good. Importantly, rather than simply arising as a result of being overcome by the passions, Alcibiades’ negative reaction assumes that rational freedom is required to reject the greater good (virtue) in favour of the lesser.

scholarly journals Socratic Appetites as Plotinian Reflectors: A New Interpretation of Plotinus’s Socratic Intellectualism

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-115
Author(s):  
Brian Lightbody
Keyword(s):  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Weakness Of Will ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
Socratic Intellectualism

Enneads I: 8.14 poses significant problems for scholars working in the Plotinian secondary literature. In that passage, Plotinus gives the impression that the body and not the soul is causally responsible for vice. The difficulty is that in many other sections of the same text, Plotinus makes it abundantly clear that the body, as matter, is a mere privation of being and therefore represents the lowest rung on the proverbial metaphysical ladder. A crucial aspect to Plotinus's emanationism, however, is that lower levels of a metaphysical hierarchy cannot causally influence higher ones and, thus, there is an inconsistency in the Egyptian's magnum opus, or so it would seem. Scholars have sought to work through this paradox by positing that Plotinus is a "paleolithic Platonist" or Socratic. The advantage of this approach is that one may be able to resolve the tension by invoking Socrates's eliminativist solution to the problem of weakness of will, as found in The Protagoras. In the following article, I argue that such attempts are not wrong-headed just underdetermined. They take up the standard reading of Socratic moral intellectualism, namely the "informational" interpretation and, therefore, fail to render a coherent view of Plotinus's moral philosophy. The following paper, in contrast, utilizes a new reading of intellectualism advanced by Brickhouse and Smith, which, when subtended with a "powers approach" to causality, resolves the aforementioned, problematic passage of Enneads.

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