Journal of the History of Philosophy

The speech by ‘the Laws’ of the Crito has commonly been understood as a case of Socratic ventriloquism, voicing a doctrine of authoritarian civic obligation that Socrates himself endorses. This, of course, generates the standard problem of reconciling this docile son of Athens with the radically autonomous Socrates of the Apology, a man obedient only to the dictates of his own reason. Roslyn Weiss’s book sets out to challenge this mainstream reading.

On Weiss’s account, the speech of the Laws is a piece of crafty Socratic rhetoric antithetical to Socrates’ own convictions. Its purpose, then, is to convince not the reader but the lawless and unphilosophical Crito that Socrates ought to remain in Athens, using terms that Crito can comprehend (terms that will benefit his soul by making him more law-abiding). Despite this false ‘oratory’ (50b6–8), however, Socrates’ own first allegiance is to “justice and philosophy” (3) whose principles dictate that he suffer the court’s judgment, “abiding by the things agreed to” at his trial (Cr. 50a2–3).

Although others have argued for this thesis, this is the first book-length argument of its kind and it supersedes all previous attempts in its persuasiveness and its thorough and detailed treatment: sensitive not only to the dialogue’s Greek and argumentative structure, but also to its literary/characterological nuances, it establishes an important scholarly outpost on the interpretation of the Crito and a worthy challenge to Richard Kraut’s reading. It is, finally, written in a remarkably engaging, clean and effective style, addressing the secondary scholarship adequately, and providing a useful bibliography and general index (though, regrettably, no Index Locorum).

The book essentially follows the text of the Crito in a series of nine chapters. After a short Introduction, Chapter 2 begins by portraying Socrates as an autonomous moral agent utterly devoted to justice; Chapter 3 distinguishes Crito from Socrates; Chapter 4 contends that 46b–50a outlines Socrates’ complete argument against escape (one compatible with the principles of the Apology); Chapter 5 unpacks Socrates’ hint at 50a–d that the Laws will be offering only rhetorical arguments; Chapter 6 outlines these arguments and their logical flaws; Chapter 7 addresses Socrates’ characterization of their effect as ‘Corybantic’ (54d); Chapter 8 explains how the Laws are able to “boost Crito to a higher rung on the moral ladder,” (6); and finally, Chapter 9 reaffirms the radical moral independence of Socrates.

Provocative and impressive, the book is bound to provoke criticism and reservations in its readers. Here I can only record a sample of my own. First, it seems to me that Weiss’s desire to portray Socrates as a slave of reason and not the state leads her astray when she tries to account for Socrates’ apparent reliance on the extrarational (15–23). Weiss, for example, tries to map out a new third alternative to the opposition between Vlastos’ view that the daimonion is no more than a kind of subjective, contentless hunch and the Brickhouse, Smith and McPherran view that the daimonion can oppose and ‘trump’ the results of rational deliberation. As she sees it, for Socrates the daimonion is not a voice independent of, and in potential conflict with, his own thinking; rather, it is the voice of his own unconscious beliefs, restraining him for his own reasons from [End Page 620] doing what he is tempted to do in moments of weakness. There is much to be said against this account, but it will suffice to point out that whatever the true nature of the daimonion might have been, Socrates is not likely to have been sympathetic to Weiss’s analysis of it. All our evidence, after all, indicates that Socrates takes the cause of the daimonion to be a god or daimoôn in the traditional sense of those terms (see, e.g., Ap. 27b–28a). Weiss’s proposal also runs up against texts such as Lysis 218C4–8 and 215C4–5, where Socrates recounts an...