Xenophon's Socrates on the Just and the Lawful (original) (raw)

Socrates and the Laws of Athens

Philosophy Compass, 2006

The claim that the citizen's duty is to "persuade or obey" the laws, expressed by the personified Laws of Athens in Plato's Crito, continues to receive intense scholarly attention. In this article, we provide a general review of the debates over this doctrine, and how the various positions taken may or may not fit with the rest of what we know about Socratic philosophy. We ultimately argue that the problems scholars have found in attributing the doctrine to Socrates derive from an anachronistic and erroneous understanding of Socrates as a kind of libertarian.

Socrates’ defence of justice in the Republic

Plato, 2022

This paper argues that the dialogical dynamic gives important information on the importance of, and the hierarchy between, the reasons illustrated in favour of justice in Plato's Republic. Despite his interlocutors' request to focus exclusively on the effect of justice in and by itself, Socrates indicates that the description of the consequences of justice included in Book 10 (608c2-621d3) is an integral part of his defence, and that some of these consequences, the rewards assigned by the gods in the afterlife, are more important than both the other consequences of justice and the benefit of justice in and by itself.

Plato’s Socrates and the law code of Athens

Filosofický časopis / The Philosophical Journal, 2021

The paper claims that Socrates’ disawoval of wisdom in the Apology is not to be taken too seriously since it belongs to the rhetorical strategy of the sovereign philosopher who speaks in front of the crowd. In the political arena, the philosopher admits his obligation to become a philosopher-king, but only under a condition: only if his fellow-citizens would freely recognize his legitimacy to rule. As a potential ruler, he has to take into consideration the existing law code which is to be respected if his intended political reform should take place and succeed. The paper stresses that despite Plato’s condemnation of the democratic way of life current in Athens, he never criticizes Athenian laws; Solonian legal reform forms a starting point for his own political project. As a brief glance at the proposed law code of Magnesia in Plato’s Laws makes clear, the Platonic philosopher is full of respect to the Athenian legislative tradition.

Socrates' Virtuous Practice of Athenian Politics

College of Dupage, 2023

This essay explores Socrates' unique involvement in Athenian politics, and we observe that Socrates' philosophical advice for politicians in the apocryphal dialogue Alcibiades I, which is grounded in the dialectic practice of "cultivation of the soul," embraces the belief that even if the entire city is blessed with having the most perfect technological/technē and scientific knowledge/epistēmē, "possessing all the sciences put together," it would still represent an impoverished state. For according to Socrates, there is no hope or "chance of getting any things well and beneficially done" if we do not have, in the first instance, the philosophical understanding/phronēsis of "good and evil" to inform and guide all of our so-called technical efforts and inspire our scientific achievements (Charmides 174d). In relation to Socrates' understanding of the philosopher and polis and what is required in order to envision and potentially establish a just and virtuously functioning city, what we find in three of Plato's dialogues might be classified as an "idealized" state and practice of politics in the Republic, a "paradigmatic" political model in the Statesman, and a "philosophical-propaedeutic" view of politics in the Alcibiades I. The problems associated with fully reconciling Socrates' practice of philosophy with politics are explored by Charles Griswold who claims that scholars searching for such a reconciliation often mistakenly do so by offering readings that suggest a legitimate "blueprint" for politics can be found in and drawn from the dialogues. There are also readings, he points out, that issue warnings against attempting to enact such a blueprint. Such approaches expose the difficulty or even impossibility of demanding that Socratic philosophy rise to the level of instituting a praxis of politikē, and so caution should be exercised when dealing with this issue, and it is essential that interpreters embrace the literary or dialogic dimension of the portrayal of Socratic philosophy in the dialogues. This so-called "dramatic-philosophical" dimension, as Griswold contends, breaks open a "horizon for reflection on ethics as well as politics," and in doing so, allows us to approach these issues in a more authentically Socratic manner, namely, "as open to question." Contrary to viewing this issue in terms of an "open question," J. A. Corlett argues that scholars seeking a consistent and cohesive view of Socratic politics often focus on the seeming inconsistency between Socrates' claims in the Apology regarding his disobeying the law insofar as it is unjust and potentially harmful to the life of a philosopher and Socrates' bold support of an individual's legal obligation in the Crito. Corlett finds no such contradiction to exist, and he argues against what he claims is the false assumption that the Crito espouses a Kantian or deontological conception of the laws and then portrays Socrates' unquestioned duty to them, whether or not the laws and the political institutions establishing them are corrupt and unjust. Corlett convincingly shows that it is Plato's creative/literary portrayal of the laws/nomoi that represents an authoritarian view, which is to say that it is the personified laws that express the conviction that it would be unethical and unjust to "disobey the legal authority of even a wrongful conviction." But this is not Socrates' position.

What Rules and Laws does Socrates Obey?

Topicos, 2019

Socrates ́ thought of justice and obedience to laws is moti- vated by a will to avoid the destructive effects of Sophistic criti- cisms and theories of laws. He thus requires–against theories of natural law–an almost absolute obedience to the law, as far as this law respects the legal system of the city. But, against legal positivism, Socrates would not admit that a law is just simply because it is a law: he is looking for the true Just. However, as often in Socratic philosophy, Socrates cannot accept that two equally justified and legitimate rights or moral values conflict.

A Counterpoint to Modernity: Laws and Philosophical Reason in Plato’s Politicus

The modern rationalist idea of rule of law, and modern rationalism in general, owes much to Plato and to Platonism. However, Plato's stance towards the laws of the city is all but clear. On the one hand, we have the seemingly 'totalitarian' Plato of the Republic, a dialogue which defends the absolute authority of philosophical wisdom over all prescriptions that are ensuing from existing cities and their laws. On the other hand, we have the 'more liberal-democratic' Plato of the Laws, a dialogue which promotes a combination of philosophical wisdom with rule of law. This ambivalence as to the issue of laws permeates one of the most enigmatic of Plato's works, the Politicus, a dialogue that was written after the Republic and before the Laws. The present essay rejects both the 'totalitarian' and the 'liberal-democratic' understanding of Plato's stance towards the laws of the city. The author defends the thesis that laws in the Politicus do not constitute a static Form that works against or with philosophical wisdom and/or democratic selflegislation, but a factor that generates a series of inescapable philosophical and political ambivalences. This approach corresponds with many of the findings of the so-called 'post-modern jurisprudence'. That is, it brings to the fore the immanent aporias of philosophical dialectics, it emphasises the irreducible un-decidability between violence and consent as foundational elements of the law, and it stresses the adiakrisia (our inability to discriminate) between the poisonous and the healing effects of laws as regards the attainment of conditions of social and political justice.

Natural law and unwritten law in Classical Greek thought

Hungarian Journal of Legal Studies, 2024

It is a common mistake of contemporary natural law scholarship to overestimate the ancient Greeks' contribution to a meaningful theory of natural law and to mistake an appeal to unwritten law with natural law's criteria for normative validity. This paper was designed to elaborate on two interrelated queries. On the one hand, it labours to reconstruct the ancient Greeks' understanding of a hierarchy of law, which is answered in the affirmative. On the other hand, the paper inquires whether there existed any meaningful sense of natural law in the Classical period, to which question the Archytean nexus of law and natural justice is offered as a palpable compromise.