This is a course on Plato's early and middle dialogues. So, in fact, it is a course on both Socrates (470-399) and Plato (427-347). Socrates was Plato's teacher. Though there is no evidence that Socrates ever wrote anything, he is the chief protagonist in most of Plato's dialogues; and several of these dialogues (the early dialogues) are thought to represent Socrates's views more or less faithfully. But Plato is not simply Socrates's intellectual biographer; though he does not mark explicitly the differences between Socrates's views and his own, later dialogues develop Plato's views on Socratic and other topics. We will focus on Plato's early, transitional, and middle dialogues, examining Socratic themes and Plato's reflection on these themes, culminating in Plato's greatest work the Republic.

Socrates was the first systematic philosopher in the Western philosophical tradition, and he focused on ethical issues. Though his dialectical inquiries begin from the moral beliefs of his interlocutors and he professes his own ignorance, he defends revisionary and paradoxical claims. He thinks that moral virtues must benefit the person who is virtuous, but he recognizes familiar other-regarding virtues, such as justice, as genuine virtues.  So he concludes that the just person is necessarily happy and cannot be harmed.  He denies that the virtues (e.g. courage, temperance, piety, and justice) are distinct; not only must a virtuous person have the other virtues in order to have any one of them, allegedly distinct virtues are really one single state. Moreover, that state is a kind of knowledge. But such a purely cognitive account of virtue apparently implies that weakness of the will (akrasia) is not really possible.  You can't know what virtue requires and yet fail to act on that knowledge. Though his dialectical methods are democratic in character and he admires various aspects of Athenian democracy, he is also a critic of democracy and suggests that moral knowledge, like other forms of craft knowledge, would be possessed by experts.

Plato takes all of these Socratic claims and paradoxes seriously. Sometimes he agrees with and develops a Socratic theme; at other times, he consciously rejects or modifies Socratic themes; and sometimes it's difficult to tell how their positions compare. Plato appears less cautious or at least less prone to professions of ignorance than Socrates. Though Plato probably thinks that a virtuous person can be harmed, he agrees with Socrates that one is always better-off being virtuous than otherwise. It's less clear that Plato is attracted to the unity of the virtues, in part because he seems to reject Socrates's purely cognitive account of the virtues in favor of one that recognizes independent affective and conative components that require habituation and training. This appears to let him resist the Socratic paradox that denies the possibility of akrasia. Though Plato is less attracted to the craft analogy than Socrates is, his political theory in the Republic is predicated on the existence of moral experts who govern the ideal state in a thoroughly authoritarian way. Plato seems much less ambivalent than Socrates in his anti-democratic tendencies.

One significant difference between Socrates and Plato is that Plato is philosophically much more wide-ranging than Socrates. Whereas Socrates is explicitly concerned primarily with ethical matters, Plato ventures widely in political philosophy, aesthetics, metaphysics, and epistemology as well. For instance, Plato thinks that whereas the sensible world is in a state of flux, only the realm of Forms or universals is perfect and unchanging. Moreover, he thinks that knowledge requires study and understanding of these non-sensible Forms. He also suggests that inquiry is not really possible unless we already know, in some sense, what we are looking for; successful inquiry, he suggests, requires having known what we are looking for during some previous life. Whereas Socrates is officially agnostic about the immortality of the soul, Plato makes the immortality of the soul a central feature of his metaphysical and epistemological views. Plato's views on such metaphysical and epistemological topics are important in their own right, but many of them also have an important bearing on his ethical theory and his ethical differences with Socrates. For instance, his views about the nature of the soul affect his accounts of justice and akrasia, and his views about Forms and their epistemological significance play a central role in the Republic's justification of authoritarian rule by philosophers.

We will examine the main interpretive and systematic issues about the views of Socrates and Plato in these dialogues and try to understand and assess their relationship to each other.

FORMAT
My plan is to present material (lecture) in ways that impose structure on the readings and raise interpretive issues for us to discuss.  Sometimes it will be helpful to discuss interpretive and systematic issues raised in the secondary literature.  I expect students to initiate discussion (e.g. ask for clarification, express skepticism, and suggest alternative interpretations).  As a result, our meetings should be liberally seasoned with discussion.

REQUIREMENTS
Those taking the course for credit will be required to write two short papers (approximately 2-3 pages each) and a longer paper (approximately 5-6 pages).  In addition, there will be a comprehensive final exam.  The first paper will be due Wednesday, October 13; the second paper will be due Friday, November 5; and the third paper will be due Wednesday, December 1 (these dates are tentative and subject to revision).  Students are encouraged to discuss their topics and plans for the paper with Dale or me in advance.  If students require an extension on a paper, they must get the extension approved in advance.  Late papers (for which an extension was not approved in advance) will lose one fraction of a grade for every day late (e.g. a paper that would have received a B+ if handed in on time will receive a B- if handed in two days late).   Study questions for the final exam will be distributed before the end of term (details later).  All requirements must be completed to receive a passing grade.  The requirements are weighted as follows: the first two papers are worth 17% each, the third paper is worth 26%, and the exam is worth 40%.  Students are not graded on a curve (that is, there is no quota for particular grades; there could in principle be a disproportionate share of As or Cs).  Students can help their grades at the margins if their grades display linear progress or they are regular and constructive contributors in class.

BOOKS
The following books should be available for student purchase at the University Bookstore.

Required:

• Plato's Complete Works, ed. J. Cooper (Hackett).

Recommended:

• Terence Irwin, Plato's Ethics (Oxford).
• The Cambridge Companion to Plato, ed. R. Kraut (Cambridge).