Abstract

For fifteen years, the authors have been working together on what they call, following the convention established by Gregory Vlastos and his associates, "Socratic philosophy." The project of Socratic philosophy is to reconstruct and assess the philosophic beliefs, doctrines, and arguments of Socrates from rigorous examination of Plato's early dialogues. Whereas Vlastos and others have believed that the philosophy so extracted is that of the historical Socrates, Brickhouse and Smith "are agnostic about whose philosophy is accurately represented in Plato's early dialogues" ; and their more particular contribution to the discussion has been to argue, again in contrast to others who work on Socratic philosophy, that a consistent philosophy can be derived from the plain sense of the words, without either convicting Socrates of logical blunders or having recourse to irony, humor, or any other literary or dramatic mode of explanation. Thus they are rebels in the Socratic philosophy society. This is their second jointly authored monograph, and, like Socrates on Trial, it builds on a number of jointly authored articles.