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

“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.

Socratic Appetites as Plotinian Reflectors: A New Interpretation of Plotinus’s 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.

Alcibiades’ Akrasia: Reason for Wrongdoing?

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.

Plato's Moral Psychology

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.

The Myth of Plato’s Socratic Period

A hypothesis first proposed in the nineteenth century has since the middle of the twentieth century been approaching mythical status. It is the hypothesis that in the course of Plato’s philosophical ‘development’, he passed through a ‘Socratic period’ in which he was principally devoted to representing the philosophy of the historical Socrates rather than his own. This Socratic philosophy is found in the so-called early dialogues and is sometimes called ‘Socratic intellectualism’. According to the myth, Plato only developed and wrote down his own philosophical position in the middle and late dialogues. In this paper, I challenge the myth, arguing that there is no external evidence to support the initial hypothesis and significant evidence for rejecting it. In fact, Plato was probably in some sense a proponent of Pythagoreanism and a ‘two-world metaphysics’ well before he wrote anything. The claim that, external evidence notwithstanding, the early dialogues actually contain a philosophical position substantially different from that of later dialogues is also unfounded. Although Plato’s thought continually developed within the context of ongoing Academic discussions, nowhere in any of the dialogues is Plato’s ‘otherworldy’ revisionist philosophy absent.

Commentary On Van Den Berg

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.