Recent Plato scholarship has grown increasingly comfortable with the notion that Plato’s art of writing brings his readers into the dialogue, challenging them to respond to deliberate errors or lacunae in the text. Drawing inspiration from Stanley Fish’s seminal reading of Satan’s speeches in Paradise Lost, this paper considers the narrative of Timaeus as deliberately unreliable, and argues that the actively critical reader is "the missing fourth" with which the dialogue famously begins. By continuing Timaeus with Critias”a dialogue that ends with a missing speech”Plato points to the kind of reader he expects: one who can answer Critias’question (Critias 107a4-6): ὡς μὲν γὰρ οὐκ εὖ Ï„á½° παρὰ σοῦ λεχθέντα εἴρηται, τίς ἂν ἐπιχειρήσειεν ἔμφρων λέγειν;

The Callicles colloquy of Plato’s Gorgias features both examination and ridicule. Insofar as Socrates’examination of Callicles proceeds via the elenchus, the presence of ridicule requires explanation. This essay seeks to provide that explanation by placing the effort to ridicule within the effort to examine; that is, the judgment/pronouncement that something/someone is worthy of ridicule is a proper part of the elenchic examination. Standard accounts of the Socratic elenchus do not include this component. Hence, the argument of this essay suggests a need to revise the standard account of the elenchus, at least as it relates to the use of that method within the Gorgias.Insofar as a revised account of the elenchus has implications for our understanding of Socratic moral psychology, the argument of this essay also suggests a need to reconsider the moral psychological framework within which Socrates operates in the Gorgias.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the last part of the Theaetetus (204-210) can be interpreted in a new way, by a discontinuous and thematic analysis and by referring to the central digression of the dialogue. The refutation of the so-called "Dream Theory" is then no longer a dead end. On the contrary it provides results certainly limited but nevertheless consistent. Indeed, through this examination, Socrates analyzes "the whole." The words πᾶν and ὅλον, designate the general rule of exhaustiveness. It is their common principle.But the two terms have also been differentiated by Socrates in the last section of the dialogue (206c-210b). These positive arguments are used to disqualify a false conception of the totality. All these points ultimately shed light on the central digression in which Socrates brings into conflict the positive activity of the Scientist and the negative activity of the Rhetorician. Basically the "whole" is the secret object of their desire and therefore the hidden stake of their debate.

This paper interprets the Republic’s "parallel" imagery of a contest between the lives of the most just and most unjust men as indicating that book 9’s two pleasure arguments are the culmination of the dialogue’s refutation of Thrasymachus’sophistry. This strategic function of the pleasure arguments explains why Socrates designates the account of the just man’s pleasure the most severe defeat of the unjust man.The article concludes with a brief defense of using the contest imagery as an interpretive aid to the dialogue.

My central thesis is that Socrates of Plato’s "early" dialogues believes he has the very wisdom he famously disavows. Eschewing the usual tack of analyzing his various avowals and disavowals of knowledge, I focus on other claims which entail a belief that he has wisdom par excellence”not just selfawareness of ignorance and not just so-called elenctic wisdom. First, I correct the common misimpression that Socrates is willing only to ask but not to answer questions. Indeed, he describes his own answers as a crucial part of his exhortative message, which, I show, involves not just an exhortation to participate in "elenctic" discussion; his exhortation to virtue is not aimed just at getting his interlocutors to understand that virtue”whatever it is!”must be pursued first and foremost. The elenchus, I argue, is only a prerequisite for understanding the much more substantive lessons of his exhortative practice, which produces "the greatest good"”indeed "happiness" itself. This interpretation, I explain, goes hand in hand with Socrates’belief that he is a "good man", invulnerable to injury, who rationally and independently always makes unerring decisions aimed at justice. In light of such beliefs, as well as his fearless claims about others’injustices, I offer a plausible explanation of why Socrates denies having bona fide wisdom and being a "teacher" of it.

In this paper I offer a close analysis of the first scene in Plato’s Crito (43a1-b9). Understanding a Platonic dialogue as a philosophical drama turns apparent scene-setting into an integral and essential part of the philosophical discussion. The two apparently innocent questions Socrates asks at the beginning of the Crito anticipate Crito’s two problems, namely how he regards his friendship with Socrates as opposed to his complicated relations with the polis and its sovereignty. These two questions are an integral part of the philosophical discussion presented throughout the dialogue.   http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2183-4105_15_2

In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates clearly indicates that he is a cognitivist about the emotions”in other words, he believes that emotions are in some way constituted by cognitive states. It is perhaps because of this that some scholars have claimed that Socrates believes that the only way to change how others feel about things is to engage them in rational discourse, since that is the only way, such scholars claim, to change another’s beliefs. But in this paper we show that Socrates is also responsive to, and has various non-rational strategies for dealing with, the many ways in which emotions can cloud our judgment and lead us into poor decision-making. We provide an account of how Socrates can consistently be a cognitivist about emotion and also have more than purely rational strategies for dealing with emotions. http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2183-4105_15_1