Blackwell Reference Online

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Plato began the discipline of ethics, the study of the good and the right, and developed it to a surprisingly sophisticated level. How did he accomplish this pioneering feat?In his stimulating early dialogues he has Socrates sharply and persistently question his contemporaries' beliefs about the virtues, wisdom and happiness. In these dialogues, Socrates uses sophisticated arguments intended to refute popular and conventional Greek conceptions of courage (Laches, Protagoras), temperance (Charmides), piety (Euthyphro), and justice (Republic I); and to throw serious doubts on popular conceptions of the good as identical with pleasure and on happiness as the satisfaction of the usual human desires for wealth, power, and honors (Gorgias). The effects of these Socratic endeavors on the “experts” he questioned were perplexity and a realization that they had opinions but no knowledge of virtue and happiness, contrary to what they first thought.In addition to these critical arguments, Plato also has Socrates pursue a new kind of question, a request for “real” definitions (not stipulations or lexical definitions) of the virtues. Socrates had to instruct his interlocutors about what kind of question this was and insisted that their answers conform to it: that they not merely give examples of each virtue, but discover from the examples what is common to them that make them instances of courage, ... log in or subscribe to read full text