BENJAMIN J. GRAZZINIyou’ (479 f.), and ‘snapping up’ a problem (489 f.), are not known in the fourth
century Socratic tradition.”
The problem is that Burnyeat appeals to the power of the image in or-
der to argue against the association of psychic maieutics with the historical
Socrates. The concern with the distinction between Plato and the historical
Socrates seems to blind Burnyeat to the distinction between Plato and his char-
acters. While Burnyeat limits the image of psychic maieutics to the Theaetetus,
he goes on to claim that that image “signals a return to the aporetic style of
those early dialogues and to the Socratic method which is the substance of
that style” (55)—although he sees that “return” as being qualifi ed by the ten-
tative or “more modest” (57) epistemological stance of the Theaetetus vis-à-vis
the Meno. It is the all-too-easy acceptance of psychic maieutics as a generalized
method that I fi nd mo st problemat ic. T he si ng u la r it y — empha si zed by Bu r nyeat
himself—of psychic maieutics seems to me to indicate that we cannot even take
psychic maieutics as obviously Platonic, let alone as a Platonic appropriation of
Socrates, without qualifi cation.
- See Rachel Rue, “The Philosopher in Flight: The Digression (172c–
177c) in Plato’s Theaetetus,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 11 (1993): 71– 100.
Rue’s insightful article shows how the “philosopher” of the digression is also
a caricature of Socrates, or of the image of the philosopher more generally.
More signifi cantly, she articulates how Plato uses that caricature to criticize
“a general tendency in philosophy—especially Platonic philosophy—to look to
essences and eternal truth, to fl ee distraction by the senses and the accidental
features of particular things and events” (91). - See A. A. Long, “Plato’s Apologies and Socrates in the Theaetetus,” in
Method in Ancient Philosophy, ed. Jyl Gentzler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 113– 36.
While I agree with Long that there is a sense in which Plato “never stops rewrit-
ing the Apology” (119), I do not agree that the transition from the Theaetetus to
the Sophist marks a turning point for Plato away from a more “Socratic” to a more
“scientifi c” mode of philosophizing (let alone to what Long calls an “unambig u-
ously elitist” philosophy, “separate from practical life” [132]). Plato’s critical
engagement with the practice of philosophy appears consistent throughout his
writings, whether the fi gure of Socrates plays a primary role therein or not. - One might also compare the remark in Plato’s Second Letter about the
dialogues being the work of “a Socrates made young and beautiful” (314c). - Theaetetus 210d2– 5; Sophist 216a1– 2; Statesman 257a1– 2.
- This political dimension of the Theaetetus, along with the Sophist and
Statesman, though still largely underexplored, has been taken up in terms of
a “philosophical trial” preceding Socrates’ trial before the jury court. See, for
example, Mitchell H. Miller, The Philosopher in Plato’s Statesman (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1980); Stanley Rosen, Plato’s Sophist: The Drama of Original and
Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); and Plato’s Statesman: The Web
of Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); and Benardete, Being of the
Beautiful. - Wengert, “Paradox of the Midwife,” offers the following statistics: The
word “midwife” (he maia) and cognates appear twenty-six times in the Platonic