Philosophy in Dialogue : Plato's Many Devices

BENJAMIN J. GRAZZINI

as one who corrupts the youth of the city will not be a matter of method,
but a matter of how particular relationships play out and are understood
in light of their consequences.^42

Notes

1. See Theaetetus, 147c7– d2, 148b6– c1, and 148e1– 6. Unless otherwise
   noted, all translations are my own, following Plato, Platonis Opera, vol. 1, ed.
   E. A. Duke, W. F. Hicken, et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).


2. I use the language of psychic maieutics and its derivatives (for example,
   “psychic maieute” in reference to Socrates) throughout. “Maieute” is not one of
   Plato’s words, but is the most straightforward English name for a practitioner
   of the maieutike techne ̄. While I acknowledge the risk of obscurity, this is not a
   stubborn insistence on an idiosyncratic vocabulary. Insofar as one of the main
   themes of this essay is that it is the differences between Socrates’ description of
   his mother’s art of midwifery and his own art of psychic maieutics that implicitly
   call into question the image of Socrates as a midwife of the soul, it is neces-
   sary to avoid confl ating those differences by using the language of midwifery
   equivocally. Moreover, given the problematic status of Socrates’ claims to and
   simultaneous denials of knowledge, the somewhat suspect connotations that
   come w ith attaching the word “psychic” to any activ it y in contemporar y (A meri-
   can) English idiom works in our favor as critical readers of Plato’s texts.


3. I am by no means the fi rst to take a more critical stance toward the
   issue of psychic maieutics. See, for example, Seth Benardete, The Being of the
   Beautiful (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and “Plato’s Theaetetus:
   On the Way of the Logos,” Review of Metaphysics 51, no. 1 (1997): 25– 53; and
   Joan C. Harrison, “Plato’s Prologue: Theaetetus 14 2a – 143 c,” Tu l a n e S t u d i e s i n Ph i -
   losophy 27 (1978): 103– 23. For a different response to the question of what Plato
   is doing in engaging this caricature of Socrates, see David Sedley, The Midwife
   of Platonism: Text and Subtext in Plato’s Theaetetus (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004). As
   his title indicates, Sedley reads the Theaetetus as Plato’s account of how Socrates
   made Plato’s own conceptions possible, and helped bring them to light.


4. Theaetetus 150d6 – 8, 157c7– d2, 161a7– b6.


5. Apology 20d8, 21b1– e1. I take the fact that I could as well appeal to the so-
   called early or Socratic dialogues, or indeed almost any member of the Platonic
   corpus, to strengthen the sense of familiarity about the picture of Socrates,
   psychic maieute.


6. Translations of the Apology are from Plato and Aristophanes, Four Texts
   on Socrates, trans. Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
   versity Press, 1984). For an extended analysis of this passage and Socrates’ re-
   lationship with the paid professional teachers of his time, see Gary Alan Scott,
   Plato’s Socrates as Educator (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000),
   13 – 49.