Socrates and the Sophist: The Problem of Polutropism in the Lesser Hippias

References

• See, for example, the editor's introduction to the Lesser Hippias in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. by E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1989): “This dialogue […] is inferior to all the others”, p. 200. Laurence Lampert also cites Paul Friedländer's view that “without the explicit testimony of Aristotle, probably few critics would consider the Hippias Minor a genuine Platonic work” (Plato 2: The Dialogues, First Period, trans. Hans Meyerhoff (New York: Pantheon, 1964), p. 146), cited in L. Lampert “Socrates' Defence of Polytropic Odysseus: Lying and Wrong-doing in Plato's Lesser Hippias” in The Review of Politics, Vol. 64, No. 2, Spring 2002, p. 231.
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• Theodore de Laguna summarises this conventional view of the Lesser Hippias succinctly when he writes: “There is nothing abstruse in the Lesser Hippias. Its general construction and its procedure in detail are simplicity itself. There is nothing in it that is beyond the comprehension of an intelligent boy of fifteen.” Th. de Laguna, “The Lesser Hippias” in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, Vol. 17, No. 20, Sep. 23, 1920, p. 550.
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• Among those who have doubted the authenticity of the Lesser Hippias are Victor Cousins and Eduard Zeller. On the other hand, Guthrie thinks that the Lesser Hippias offers us an authentic portrait of the historical Socrates. See W. K. C. Guthrie, History of Greek Philosophy, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 197.
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• B. Jowett, “Appendix“ in Menexenus (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), pp. 21–2.
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• See, for example, St Jerome, Hieronymus, Liber de Viris Illustribus, ed. E. C. Richardson, §9. For a full discussion of St Jerome's principles of interpretation and textual see criticism, see Karl Kelchner Hulley, ‘Principles of Textual Criticism Known to St. Jerome’ in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. 55 (1944), pp. 87–109.
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• B. Jowett, op. cit., p. 22.
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• See C. H. Kahn, Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996).
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• B. Jowett, op. cit., p. 22.
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• B. Jowett, op. cit., p. 22.
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• B. Jowett, op. cit., p. 24.
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• J. Derrida, “Plato's Pharmacy“ in Dissemination, tr. B. Johnson (London: Athlone, 2000), p. 139.
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• See Ibid.
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• See Gorgias, 469 b.
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• Despite the reference to ‘an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy’ in Republic X (607c), and the numerous criticisms of poetry in other works, Plato nevertheless has Socrates allude to or quote from the poets throughout his works. For an informative discussion of Plato's use of poetic allusion, see E. E. Pender, ‘Poetic Allusion in Plato's Timaeus and Phaedrus’, Göttinger Forum für Altertumwissenschaft, 10, 51–87.
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• Lesser Hippias (365a);all subsequent references to the Lesser Hippias are given in parentheses in the main text.
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• See J. J. Mulhern, “Tropos and Polutropia in Plato's Hippias Minor“ in Phoenix, Vol. 22, No. 4, Winter 1968, pp. 283—288.
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• See Sophistical Refutations, 165b ff trans. E. S. Forster and D. J. Furley (Camb. Mass., Loeb Classical Library, 1992).
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• See Kahn, op. cit., p. 115.
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• The teachings of the sophists undoubtedly had a major impact on the culture of Ancient Greece; fears arose that they taught how to make the weaker argument stronger, and certainly why satirising them would have served to unmask their pretensions, Plato was sufficiently worried to treat their views with seriousness. On this point see, for example, G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
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• “The Hippias Minor is not formally aporetic, but it does leave us with a problem for the other dialogues to resolve. Of course, seen in a broader perspective the Ion and the Hippias are both big with the future”. C. Kahn, op. cit., p. 118.
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• Sophist, 230b.
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• Ibid, 231a.
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• Ibid.
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• Ibid.
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• Ibid, 231b.
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• Ibid, 235a.
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• See Metaphysics, trans. H. Tredennick (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1933), Book Gamma 2, 1004b.
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• See, for example, the immoralism of the sophistical Callicles, the third of Socrates’ interlocutors in the Gorgias. Callicles effectively argues that the better person is the one who does wrong voluntarily rather than suffers wrong.
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• See C. Kahn, op. cit., pp. 121—24. Kahn notes that scholars have argued for both the possibility that Antisthenes’ work predates Plato's and that Plato's predates Antisthenes’. His own view is that Antisthenes’ is the earlier and the Lesser Hippias a response to it. In support of this he says first that Antisthenes was the older writer and then that supposing that Plato is responding to Antisthenes allows us “to make much better sense […] of Socrates’ hermeneutic mischief” (p. 122, n. 25).
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• C. Kahn, op. cit. p. 122f.
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• C. Kahn, op. cit. p. 123.
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• See Rhetoric, trans. J. H. Freese (Camb. Mass: Loeb Classical Library, 1926), 1399a 15.
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