Penner (T.), Rowe (C.) Plato's Lysis. Pp. xiv + 366. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Cased, £55, US$95. ISBN: 978-0-521-79130-4 (original) (raw)

The Classical Review, 2008

Abstract

The Lysis is a much trickier dialogue than is often realised. Although it focusses on the nature of erôs and philia, it is not a dialogue of deμnition. Although it shows Socrates in debate with three consecutive interlocutors, it cannot exactly be described as ‘elenctic’ in nature. Although it arguably identiμes ‘the μrst philon’ with knowledge of the ‘good’, it contains no explicit mention of the Forms. Although it is short, and features Socrates puzzling over an ethical (or semi-ethical) concept, and is devoid of any reference to the Forms, its traditional classiμcation as an ‘early’ Socratic dialogue can be, and has been, questioned. To the task of analysing this di ̧cult dialogue Penner and Rowe have brought great enthusiasm and considerable philosophical expertise. Their enthusiasm for the Lysis is such as to lead them to declare that ‘the treatment of philia in the Lysis is actually in important respects superior to what Aristotle has to say about the subject in his Ethics’ (p. 299). There is little doubt that this claim will strike most students of ancient theories of interpersonal relations as preposterous, just as it did (and still does) this reviewer. Yet it is not a claim that P. and R. toss in lightly or merely to provoke. Coming as it does at the conclusion of a long and intricate chain of arguments, it is obviously intended seriously, and should be given serious attention. No less impressive than the arguments themselves, however, is the manner in which they are articulated. P. and R.’s presentation of Plato’s Lysis does what, to my knowledge, no other book on Plato does: it takes the reader by the hand and shares with him the di ̧culties, puzzlement, irritation and – yes – wonder involved in reading a Socratic dialogue step by step. Engagingly, the two authors do not hesitate to confess their own earlier mis-readings of sections of the dialogue, and to record whatever misgivings either or both may still harbour about individual points at the time of going to press. For all that, the guide to the Lysis that they o¶er is full and μrm, and the reader’s attention is held throughout. No aspect of the dialogue, however seemingly trivial or merely eristic, is passed over, ‘solutions’ to di ̧culties and paradoxes are vigorously argued for, and the ‘failings’ of other interpretations, notably those of R. Robinson (1953) and Vlastos (1969 and 1990), are exposed repeatedly and in detail. Most importantly, the very way in which P. and R. conduct their analysis constitutes an e¶ective demonstration of the fact that a Platonic dialogue is not a series of discrete arguments, as analytic interpreters still too often tend to assume, but a unitary and sustained piece of reasoning which is all of a piece with the literary vehicle in which it is presented. Although they adopt this methodological approach, P. and R. rely mostly on philosophical arguments. To understand Socrates’ intellectualist position in the Lysis and elsewhere, so they claim, requires abandoning the Fregean thesis that meaning

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