ANNE-MARIE BOWERYamazement Socrates is not willing to guarantee that it was Clinias; it might also
have been Ctesippus” (Szlezák, Reading Plato, 88).
- The Phaedo ends with Echecrates making a summation (118a). The last
line of the Protagoras has elements of a summation: “Our conversation was over
so we left” (362a). However, there is no extended fi nal conversation in the exter-
nal frame of any other dialogue. - Steven Dubner, “Calculating the Irrational in Economics,” New York
Times (online), June 28, 2003. See also Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emo-
tion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994). - See Robert Solomon, “The Joy of Philosophy: Thinking Thin Versus
the Passionate Life,” Review of Metaphysics 55 (2002): 876– 78; and “Reasons for
Love,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 32 (2002): 115– 44; Robert Rob-
erts, The Schooled Heart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Martha
Nussbaum, “Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions,” Graduate
Faculty Philosophy Journal 23 (2002): 235– 38; Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination
and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Hill, 1995); and Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philos-
ophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Steven Toulmin,
Return to Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Genevieve
Lloyd, Man of Reason: Male and Female in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1984). - Despite the fact that she argues strongly for the affective dimension
of human experience throughout her now extensive corpus, Nussbaum’s view
of Socrates remains problematic. For a critique of her view of Socrates, see Mi-
chael Beaty and Anne-Marie Bowery, “Cultivating Christian Citizenship: Mar-
tha Nussbaum’s Socrates, Au gustine’s Confessions, and the Modern University,”
Christian Scholar’s Review 31 (2003): 21– 52; and also Bruce S. Thornton, “Culti-
vating Sophistry,” Arion 6, no. 2 (1998): 180– 204. - In what does the Socratic ideal consist? According to Nussbaum in Cul-
tivating Humanity, it
means a life that accepts no belief as authoritative simply because it has
been handed down by tradition or become familiar through habit, a life
that questions all beliefs and accepts only those that survive reason’s de-
mand for consistency and for justifi cation. Training this capacity requires
developing the capacity to reason logically, to test what one reads or says
for consistency of reasoning, correctness of fact, and accuracy of judgment.
(Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity [Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1997], 17– 18)- This interpretation of Socrates is famously presented by Friedrich
Nietzsche. I mention only one example:
If one needs to make a tyrant of reason, as Socrates did, then there must
exist no little danger of something else playing the tyrant. Rationality was at
that time divined as a saviour; neither Socrates nor his “invalids” were free
to be rational or not, as they wished—it was de rigueur, it was their last expe-
dient. The fanaticism with which the whole of Greek thought throws itself at