Remembering Socrates

Lindsay Judson and Vassilis Karasmanis present a selection of philosophical papers by an outstanding international team of scholars assessing the legacy and continuing relevance of Socrates'' thought 2400 years after his death. Socrates'' life philosophical activity and death not only had a formative effect on his follower Plato and thus indirectly on almost the whole course of Greek philosophy but also represented a moral and philosophical ideal which has been the inspiration or the despair of many philosophers and other thinkers down to the present day. The topics of the papers include Socratic method as portrayed by Plato and by Xenophon; the notion of definition; Socrates'' intellectualist conception of ethics; famous arguments in the Euthyphro and Crito and a not-so famous argument in the Hippias Major; and aspects of the later portrayal and reception of Socrates as a philosophical and ethical exemplar - by Plato the Sceptics and in the early Christian era. The collection demonstrates the vitality as well as the diversity of Socratic studies and will interest many ancient philosophers historians of philosophy and classicists.