Bryn Mawr Classical Review 94.10.04 http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1994/94.10.04.html[10/14/2014 9:04:03 PM] Bryn Mawr Classical Review 94.10.04 Gregory Vlastos, Socratic Studies. Edited by Myles Burnyeat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii + 152. $54.95. ISBN 0-521-44213-3. Reviewed by Lloyd P. Gerson, University of Toronto. In 1991 Gregory Vlastos published an extraordinarily learned and provocative book, Socrates. I ronist and Moral Philosopher , the fruit of a lifetime of study. In the Preface to that book he promised a sequel containing mainly revisions made of previously published works in the light of criticism and subsequent research. That promised work has now appeared, alas, posthumously. It contains revisions of four previously published essays along with one entirely new work. The editor, Myles Burnyeat, notes that the new essay is not in a completely polished form. Missing is a planned sixth essay which was not sufficiently far along at the time of Vlastos's death to be included here. Burnyeat adds as an epilogue a moving commencement address delivered by Vlastos at Berkeley in 1987 titled "Socrates and Vietnam". The four essays previously published are: (1) "The Socratic Elenchus" ( Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1 [1983] 27-58); (2) "Socrates' Disavowal of Knowledge" ( Philosophical Quarterly 35 [1985] 1-31); (3) "Is the 'Socratic Fallacy' Socratic" ( Ancient Philosophy 10 [1990] 1-16); (4) "The Historical Socrates and Athenian Democracy" ( Political Theory 11 [1983] 495-515). The new essay is "The Protagoras and the Laches", a piece arguing for the chronological priority of the former to the latter based on doctrinal development. Each of these essays is like a polished diamond, hard-edged, multi-faceted, and brilliant, manifesting the refined rhetorical style of Vlastos familiar to everyone working in ancient Greek philosophy. All of the essays were obviously intended to stand on their own, but read together and along with the previous volume the interpretative theory underlying them becomes powerfully evident. It is that in the early dialogues of Plato we can discover a philosopher, Socrates, with a distinctive method and doctrine. This philosopher, obviously the main inspiration for Plato, begins to recede into the background beginning roughly with the Meno. As Vlastos proclaims, "Socrates has been and always will be my philosophical hero (133)." Not surprisingly therefore, the attempted recovery of Socrates' philosophy is also a defense of it and perforce a criticism, rather muted in these two volumes, of Plato's innovations. Vlastos' interpretation is set squarely against at least two longstanding alternatives. First, one can argue that the real Socrates is practically unrecoverable and that the Socrates of the dialogues is only a mask for Plato at one stage of his development. Second, it can be argued that the historical Socrates had no distinctive philosophy or that if he did, it was insubstantial, inchoate, or insignificant. On this view it was Socrates' character or personality that engaged his disciples. Over the last twenty-five years or so no one has done more than Vlastos to rehabilitate Socrates as a philosopher in his own right and to invigorate the search for his unique legacy. Each of the essays here is an effort to locate one piece of the puzzle of Socrates in its true place. Interested readers should consult two recent extensive and critical assessments of Vlastos's interpretation, both in Ancient Philosophy 13 (1993): Debra Nails, "Problems with Vlastos's Platonic Developmentalism," 273-91 and John Beversluis, "Vlastos's Quest for the Historical Socrates," 293-312.