Socratic Problem
The Socratic problem
results from the inability to determine what, in the writings of Plato,
is an accurate portrayal of Socrates' thought and what is the thought of
Plato with Socrates as a
literary device. Socrates,
often credited with founding western philosophy and who was put to death
by the democracy of Athens in May, 399 BC, was Plato's teacher and
mentor; Plato, like some of his contemporaries, wrote dialogues about
his departed teacher.
Most of what we know
about Socrates comes from
the writings of Plato; however, it is widely believed that only some of
Plato's dialogues are verbatim accounts of conversations or unmediated
representations of Socrates' thought. Many of the dialogues seem to use
Socrates as a device for Plato's thought, and inconsistencies
occasionally crop up between Plato and the other accounts of
Socrates; for instance,
Plato has Socrates
constantly denying that he would ever accept money for teaching, while
Xenophon's Symposium clearly has Socrates stating that he is paid by
students to teach wisdom and this is what he does for a living. Given
the apparent evolution of thought in Plato's dialogues from his early
years to his middle and later years, it is often believed that the
dialogues began to represent less of Socrates and more of Plato as time
went on. However, the question of exactly what aspects of Plato's
dialogues are representative of Socrates and what are not is far from
agreed upon.
Karl Popper treats the
Socratic problem in his first book of The Open Society and Its Enemies
(1945).
The German classical
scholar Friedrich Schleiermacher made an attempt to solve the "Socratic
problem". Schleiermacher maintains that the two dialogues Apology and
Crito are purely Socratic, which is to say, rather accurate historical
portrayals of the real man, Socrates, and hence history — and not
Platonic philosophy at all. All of the other dialogues that
Schleiermacher accepted as genuine, he considered to be integrally bound
together and consistent in their Platonism. Their consistency is related
to the three phases of Plato's development:
-
Foundation works,
culminating in Parmenides;
-
Transitional works,
culminating in two so-called families of dialogues, the first
consisting of Sophist, Statesman and Symposium, and the second of
Phaedo and Philebus; and finally
-
Constructive works:
Republic, Timaeus and Laws.
Schleiermacher's views
as to the chronology of Plato's work are rather controversial. In
Schleiermacher's view, the character of
Socrates evolves over
time into the "Stranger" in Plato's work, and fulfills a critical
function in Plato's development as he appears in the first family above
as the "Eleatic Stranger" in Sophist and Statesman, and the "Manitenean
Stranger" in the Symposium. The "Athenian Stranger" is the main
character of Plato's Laws. Further, the Sophist-Statesman-Philosopher
family makes particularly good sense in this order, as Schleiermacher
also maintains that the two dialogues, Symposium and Phaedo show
Socrates as the quintessential philosopher in life (guided by Diotima)
and into death, the realm of otherness. Thus the triad announced both in
the Sophist and in the Statesman is completed, though the Philosopher,
being divided dialectically into a "Stranger" portion and a "Socrates"
portion, isn't called "The Philosopher" — this philosophical crux is
left to the reader to figure out. Schleiermacher thus takes the position
that the real Socratic problem is understanding the dialectic between
the figures of the "Stranger" and "Socrates."
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_problem
-
Popper, Karl (2002)
The Open Society and Its Enemies. New York: Routledge. ISBN
978-0415290630
-
Schleiermacher,
Friedrich (1973) Introductions to the Dialogues of Plato. Ayer Co.
Publishers. ISBN 978-0405048685.
-
Schleiermacher,
Friedrich (1996) Ueber die Philosophie Platons. Philos. Bibliotek.
Band 486, Meiner Verlag. ISBN 978-3787314621.
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