PHIL HOPKINSparticular context and to carefully weigh all considerations, or more
particularly, when what is merely eijkov~ is taken for the truth. Bad faith
is often the motivation for such mistakes. In Thucydides and in Plato,
eijkov~ reasoning involves inferences of what is likely, reasonable, plau-
sible, or, as Socrates says in the Phaedrus, of what is like (o{moio~) the
truth (273d). One must resort to such inferences in those cases where
the truth itself is unavailable, when the issue to be decided, as is often
the case in Thucydides, concerns a future event or future outcome of
present strategy, deliberation, or action. The sophists often appealed to
eijkov~ reasoning, believing, it seems, that such reasoning is often more
persuasive than the simple truth.^27 Socrates reproves the sophists for
this practice in several places.^28
There are similarities worth noting between the invitation to par-
ticipate in bad faith in the use of eijkov~ reasoning in Thucydides and a
kind of bad faith exercised by some of the interlocutors and many of the
readers of the dialogues. The very effort to come to a defi nition in the
“Socratic” dialogues, the effort to give an “account” that would allow
the possessor to recognize some part of the world for what it is, exhib-
its, and tempts the reader to join, a search for determinate formulas,
general defi nitions covering all cases. In Thucydides’ History, the bad
faith prompted in the reader is ultimately educated and rehabilitated
by the tensions created between the elements of the text in relation. In
Platonic dialogue, the tensions that develop in the conversations of the
interlocutors demonstrate that the mere possession of a “formula” or
“defi nition” does not lead to understanding.
A telling example of how knowing a formula does not ensure un-
derstanding the matter the formula describes is found in the Euthyphro
(8c– e), where Socrates offers Euthyphro’s own formula of piety to him
in several versions, the last almost verbatim, to force Euthyphro to aban-
don his position. After securing Euthyphro’s agreement to several ver-
sions of his own formula that “no one among gods or men ventures to
say that the wrongdoer must not be punished” (8e), Socrates uses that
formula against Euthyphro’s claim that he is acting piously in his present
situation, despite the fact that Euthyphro explicitly offers the formula as
a defense of his actions, since Socrates wouldn’t allow the example of his
actions to stand as a general defi nition of piety.
As is often the case in Socratic elenchus, the holder of a particular
formula concerning justice or beauty or courage or some other virtue
is shown not to fully understand his own formula and all it entails. And
lest one think that if one could only avoid the errors of the interlocu-
tors and approach the question more intelligently, one could succeed
in coming up with the desired determinate formula where the inter-