Cross-Examining Socrates
A Defense of the Interlocutors in Plato's Early Dialogues

A re-reading of Plato's early dialogues from the interlocutors' point of view.

John Beversluis (Author)

9780521550581, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 January 2000

432 pages
23.5 x 16 x 3 cm, 0.73 kg

' … one of the best book on Socrates to appear in many years.' David Sedley

This book is a rereading of Plato's early dialogues from the point of view of the characters with whom Socrates engages in debate. Socrates' interlocutors are generally acknowledged to play important dialectical and dramatic roles, but no previous book has focused mainly on them. Existing studies are thoroughly dismissive of the interlocutors and reduce them to the status of mere mouthpieces for views which are hopelessly confused or demonstrably false. This book takes interlocutors seriously and treats them as genuine intellectual opponents whose views are often more defensible than commentators have standardly thought. The author's purpose is not to summarise their positions or the arguments of the dialogues in which they appear, much less to produce a series of biographical sketches, but to investigate the phenomenology of philosophical disputation as it manifests itself in the early dialogues.

Introduction
1. The Socratic interlocutor
2. Elenchus and sincere assent
3. Crito
4. Ion
5. Hippias
6. Laches and Nicias
7. Charmides and Critias
8. Euthyphro
9. Cephalus
10. Polemarchus
11. Thrasymachus
12. Hippocrates
13. Protagoras
14. Gorgias
15. Polus
16. Callicles
17. The last days of the Socratic interlocutor.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: Ancient, to c 500 [HPCA]