I will note some of those insights, and then raise a couple of problems with the book.Ī natural place to describe and evaluate a person's character is a judicial trial, especially a Greek one with its looser rules of evidence in which the person is on trial, not merely for a particular crime but, as Socrates makes clear, for his life. The payoff from her thesis is in insightful readings of several of the dialogues. Instead of distinguishing philosophy from sophistic, Plato, she thinks, is at pains to distinguish the philosopher from the sophist. Second, McCoy's thesis has a polemical edge it denies the claims of many commentators who think there is a difference between Socratic and sophistic method.
Philosophy 100 readings spark notea how to#
So saying that Plato distinguishes Socrates from the sophists by their respective characters doesn't solve the problem it instead tells us how to look at it. First, there is no simple way of separating Socrates from the sophists, and the drama of several of the dialogues consists in exploring that complexity, as characters, not excluding Socrates, find the difference between Socrates and the sophists difficult to make out. Marina McCoy's book has a simple thesis: "Plato distinguishes Socrates from the sophists by differences in character and moral intention" (p.
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