Journal of the History of Philosophy

Book Reviews Debra Nails. Agora,Academy,and the ConductofPhilosophy.Philosophical Studies, Series 63. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995. Pp. xix + 264. Board, $13o.oo. Socrates--if not the man himself, then the character in Plato's early dialogues--spent his time talking to people and asking them questions, typically about ethical topics. He hoped by this means to discover definitions of the virtues, thinking that in learning what each of the virtues is he would himself become virtuous and that this would make his life a happy one. He also hoped to expose other people's false conceit of knowledge about ethical matters, thinking that such conceit stood in the way of their becoming virtuous and happy. Plato, in contrast, advanced a vision of reality that sees the changing world around us and the things within it as images of a separate world of independently existing, eternal, and unchanging entities called forms or ideas. Ordinary objects , he thought, are what they are and have the features they do in virtue of their participation in these more fundamental realities. Forms are the proper objects of knowledge or understanding, and the desire to attain understanding of them should be the dominant motivation in a healthy human life. The apprehension and appreciation of formal reality makes life worth living; it also makes one moral. I believe that, or something like it. So, probably, do you. Nails argues, in her challenging and important (and, sad to tell, expensive) book, that these common answers to the Socratic question (chapter 2) and the Platonic question (chapter 3) cannot stand. The often-claimed consensus on an "early" group of dialogues does not exist (chapter 4)--the only point on which all hands agree is that the Apologyis "pre-middle" (66). The best efforts to distinguish such a group of dialogues by philosophical means do not succeed (chapter 5), and recent efforts, whether stylometric or philologicalhistorical , to establish the order in which Plato wrote the dialogues and a development within his thought, likewise fail (chapters 6 and 7). Socrates and Plato should be distinguished from one another, not by agenda and doctrine, Nails argues, but by their different methods of conducting philosophy. Havelock 's idea that Socrates was an oralist while Plato was a textualist (chapter 8), however, cannot be made out; the evidence supports neither the view that Socrates was illiterate (chapter 9) nor the view that literacy is necessary for abstraction, moral judgment, individuality, and the like (chapter lo). We should say rather, Nails argues, that Socrates engaged in serious philosophical discussions with any and all willing parties, using methods of question and answer that included but were not restricted to the elenchus (chapter 11), while Plato, perhaps responding to weaknesses he perceived with the purely oral conduct of philosophy (especially the impermanence of its results and its [293] 294 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 35:2 APRIL ~997 inability to deal with large and complex philosophical systems), wrote dialogues (chapter 12). Some of these--the Socratic dialogues--depict Socrates engaged in the oral conduct of philosophy. Others are "didactic"; still others are "mixed." What is distinctive of the dialogues taken as a whole, and of the Socratic dialogues in particular, is what Nails calls "double openendedness": a refusal to regard as fixed or settled not just the conclusions of philosophical argument but also the assumptions that lead to those conclusions (3, ~I8-19). There is much to discuss in a book as rich and provocative as this one is, and we will hear plenty, I'm sure, when the developmentalist empire strikes back. Considerations of space restrict me here to two brief remarks on the project of distinguishing Socrates from Plato in terms of focus and doctrine. First, although there are many details to worry about, Nails may well be right in her attempt to distinguish Socrates from Plato by appeal to their different ways of doing philosophy. But it does not follow from this that they cannot also be distinguished in terms of focus and doctrine: perhaps we can have it both ways. Second, the effort to distinguish by focus and doctrine as well as by method need not depend on any view...