Thomas C. Brickhouse

An introduction to Plato's Republic

This interpretive introduction provides unique insight into Platos Republic. Stressing Platos desire to stimulate philosophical thinking in his readers, Julia Annas here demonstrates the coherence of his main moral argument on the nature of justice, and expounds related concepts of education, human motivation, knowledge and understanding. In a clear systematic fashion, this book shows that modern moral philosophy still has much to learn from Platos attempt to move the focus from questions of what acts the just person ought to perform to the more profound questions of what sort of person the just person ought to be.

Apology Of Socratic Studies

In this paper, we defend Socratic studies as a research programme against several recent attacks, including at least one recently published in Polis (by William Prior). Critics have argued that the study of Socrates, based upon evidence mostly or entirely derived from some set of Plato’s dialogues, is sfounded upon faulty and indefensible historical or hermeneutical technique. We begin by identifying what we believe are the foundational principles of Socratic studies, as the field has been pursued in recent years, and we then show how the research programme that derives from accepting these principles is not defeated by any of the most common recent criticisms of it. Specifically, we argue that challenges to sorting Plato’s dialogues by date, more general challenges to historicist interpretations of Plato’s dialogues, as well as recent literary criticisms of Socratic studies all fail to undermine the research programme. We conclude with some thoughts about how and why Socratic studies has proved itself a valuable and fruitful research programme.

Socrates on the emotions

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

Socrates on Punishment and the Law:Apology 25c5-26b2

In his interrogation of Meletus in Plato’s version of Socrates’ defense speech, Socrates offers an interesting argument that promises to provide important evidence for his views about crime and punishment—if only we can understand how the argument is supposed to work. It is our project in this paper to do that. We argue that there are two main problems with the argument: one is that it is not obvious how to make the argument valid; the other is that the argument seems to rely on a distinction that Socrates himself rejects ––a distinction between voluntary and involuntary wrongdoing. Earlier discussions of the argument require Socrates to be using a premise here that he regards as false. In this paper, we argue that Socrates actually regards the critical premise as true, and thus we end up providing a significantly new interpretation of Socrates’ view that all wrongdoing is involuntary. We claim, that even this position (which most scholars regard as unproblematically attributed to the Platonic Socrates) must accommodate the idea (contained in the critical premise of the Apology argument) that some people really do voluntary harm to others.

Moral Psychology in Plato’s Apology

In this essay, we argue that several passages in Plato’s Apology, cannot be appropriately understood by what has come to be the most widely accepted interpretation of what is called “Socratic intellectualism.” According to this view, Socrates saw no role in the explanation of human behavior for such psychological factors as appetites or passions/emotions. We claim, on the contrary, that the passages we consider in Plato’s Apology, actually reveal that Socrates was quite ready to explain human behavior in precisely the way this interpretation claims he would not (or could not) do. We then provide an understanding of what Socrates is saying in these passages that makes much better sense of them but also continues to depict Socratic moral psychology as intellectualist, insofar as it remains true in our account that all human agents always act in ways that reflect their beliefs about what is best for them at the time of action.

Is the Prudential Paradox in the Meno

Few, if any, essays on the philosophy of Socrates have had a greater influence on contemporary scholarship than has Gerasimos Santas’ “The Socratic Paradoxes.”1 Prior to the publication of this paper in 1964, scholars were inclined to lump together two views that are prominent in Plato’s so-called early dialogues. The first is that no one wants what is bad for oneself and so all who pursue bad things do so involuntarily. The second is that because virtue is knowledge, all who do injustice and moral evil do so involuntarily. If taken to be expressions of what is essentially the same doctrine, each implies that, for Socrates, no one wants injustice in the way no one wants, say, ill health. Not surprisingly, until the publication of “The Socratic Paradoxes,” few scholars were inclined to take Socrates’ moral psychology very seriously, since it seems to fly in the face of the obvious truth that some people are actually quite eager to do injustice, at least when they can do it with impunity.