Journal of the History of Philosophy

Unlike many other dialogues, Plato’s Charmides has never elicited much sustained scholarly attention, even though it focuses on an important moral excellence, sôphrosunê (temperance, moderation), features two of Plato’s relatives who were members of the oligarchic government of 304–303 BC, and includes two refutations of the Republic’s formula, “doing one’s own things,” as well as a long, complex discussion of “knowledge of knowledge.” The present work is therefore a welcome addition to the small collection of English books on it (Tuckey, Plato’s Charmides; Hyland, The Virtue of Philosophy; Schmid, Plato’s Charmides and the Socratic Ideal of Rationality).

Early chapters, comprising nearly half the book’s length, introduce the author’s motivating concern: to grasp the relationship between “the literary and the argumentative dimensions” (3), the dialogue’s historical and cultural context (ch. 2), the opening scene (ch. 3), and the psychagogic and paideutic functions of dialectic (ch. 4). Especially noteworthy are his critique of the retrojective assumptions of modern scholars about what “philosophy” was taken to be in antiquity (6–14), his extensive re-evaluation of the historical Critias and Charmides (53–89), and the detailed rational reconstruction of Zalmoxian medicine (110–30). The discussion of sôphrosunê (90–98), incorporating previous work by North (Sophrosyne) and Rademaker (Sophrosyne and the Rhetoric of Self-Restraint), is the best short summary available in English.

As the subtitle suggests, the core argument of the book opposes the once-widespread belief that Socratic elenchus is only negative or critical, whether one believes this is a problem or not. Thus, chapters 5–10 take the reader very carefully through the dialogue’s “argument”—which the author considers “a single progressive investigation of” sôphrosunê (155)—arguing at each stage for the positive content or possibilities of what appear to be purely negative refutations. Since dialectic is psychagogic on the author’s view, refutations lead interlocutors, as dialogues lead readers, to deeper understandings of the subject that are specified step by step. The argument culminates in the overall claim that the view to which the interlocutors and we are led in the Charmides is that sôphrosunê is knowledge of [End Page 310] the good. Chapter 11 then argues more generally that this knowledge is essentially elenctic and that the good is the unconditional good by virtue of (or through relation to) which all (other) conditional goods are beneficial.

In many ways, this is a model of what monographs about Plato’s dialogues should be and do. Rather than looking at selected bits and pieces, the author interprets the dialogue as an organic whole to which the contribution of every element may be understood, and in its well-defined historical and cultural context. He maintains a distinction, often lost, between what Socrates says and does in the dialogue and what Plato does by having him say and do that. His engagement with the secondary literature beyond English is admirable, as are the depth and detail of his analyses of the perplexing arguments of 165c–175a (189–286), but it is disappointing that he does not engage more directly with Schmid’s very different view of what Critias and Charmides represent and of what “Socratic rationality” is. His attempted rehabilitation of Critias should motivate a broader, more careful, and deeper reassessment of characters in the dialogues. It is certainly reasonable to attribute serious ideas to Critias, and to suppose that Plato is responding to them among other things, but the author’s attempts to whitewash the oligarchic misdeeds of 304–303 BC (59–99) are unlikely to persuade many.

Similarly, as a critique of the Vlastosian orthodoxy in the English-speaking world, this is an excellent book. But readers who have not been in thrall to Vlastos, or have not thought there was a Socratic philosophy to be found in Plato’s dialogues as distinct from Plato’s own philosophy, may be troubled that the...