A. "For there exists a great chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand, think and feel--a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance--and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no moral or aesthetic principle; these last lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes; and without insisting on a rigid classification, we may, without too much fear of contradiction, say that, in this sense, Dante belongs to the first category, Shakespeare to the second; Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs; Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce are foxes" (Berlin 1-2).

B. Aporia is "a situation in which we no longer know what to say about the question at issue, how to get out of the difficulty presented by the contradiction between the original claim and the conclusion of the ensuing argument" (Frede 210).

C. "Socrates, even before I met you they told me that in plain truth you are a perplexed man yourself and reduce others to perplexity. At this moment I feel you are exercising magic and witchcraft upon me and positively laying me under your spell until I am just a mass of helplessness. If I may be flippant, I think that not only in outward appearance but in other respects as well you are exactly like the flat sting-ray that one meets in the sea. Whenever anyone comes into contact with it, it numbs him, and that is the sort of thing that you seem to be doing to me now. My mind and my lips are literally numb, and I have nothing to reply to you. Yet I have spoken about virtue hundreds of times, held forth often on the subject in front of large audiences, and very well too, or so I thought. Now I can't even say what it is. In my opinion you are well advised not to leave Athens and live abroad. If you behaved like this as a foreigner in another country, you would most likely be arrested as a wizard" (Meno 127-128).

D. In the course of a dialogue, James Boyd White has written, "the language of the interlocutor is remade, converted into what are called paradoxes (that is, previously impossible or unimaginable statements that he must now accept or that he is at least incapable of rationally rejecting). The effect of all this is to disturb the relation between self and language, to break down the sense of natural connection and coherence between them. One comes suddenly to see both self and language as uncertain, as capable of being remade in relation to each other. The true aim of a dialogue . . . is the reconstitution of self and language" (White 95).

A. Cephalus

View of justice: Justice is external to the individual, consisting of rules or duties to be performed.

Problem for Socrates: Cephalus has lead a moderate life but has not done so through self-examination.

B. Polemarchus

Views of justice: 1. "It is just to give to each what is owed to him" (331e 3-4). 2. Justice "gives benefits to friends and does harm to enemies" (332d 7-8).

Problem for Socrates: Pursuit of the craft analogy, with its capacity for opposites, leads to skepticism unless there is knowledge of a proper and good end.

C. Thrasymachus

Views of justice: 1. Justice is the advantage of the stronger (338 c).

2. Justice is obeying the rulers (339 b).

3. Justice is another's good while injustice is one's own good; therefore, it is best to be unjust (343 b-344 d).

Problem for Socrates: Thrasymachus refuses to be fully engaged with Socrates because his moral skepticism makes him unwilling to agree to fundamental elenctic principles, e.g., stating fully and truthfully one's own beliefs.

A. "What he reminds me of more than anything is one of those little sileni that you see on the statuaries' stalls; you know the ones I mean--they're modeled with pipes or flutes in their hands, and when you open them down the middle there are little figures of the gods inside. And then again, he reminds of Marsyas the satyr. . . . Now the only difference, Socrates, between you and Marsyas is that you can get just the same effect without any instrument at all--with nothing but a few simple words, not even poetry. . . . When we listen to you . . . we're absolutely staggered and bewitched. . . . For the moment I hear him speak I am smitten with a kind of sacred rage, worse than any Corybant, and my heart jumps into my mouth and the tears start into my eyes--oh, and not only me, but lots of other men. Yes, I've heard Pericles and all the other great orators, and very eloquent I thought they were, but they never affected me like that; they never turned my whole soul upside down and left me feeling as if I were the lowest of the low. But this latter-day Marsyas, here, has often left me in such a state of mind that I've felt I simply couldn't go on living the way I did" (Alcibiades' speech in Plato's Symposium 215 a-216 a).

elenchus = refutation

aporia = see I.B above

techne = skill or craft; "an organized body of knowledge of the ways to achieve a certain end" (Annas 25)

Cephalus and his sons, Polemarchus, Lysias, Euthydemus

Adeimantus, Glaucon, brothers of Plato

Thrasymachus

Annas, Julia. An Introduction to Plato's Republic. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1981.

Berlin, Isaiah. The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953.

Frede, Michael. "Plato's Arguments and the Dialogue Form." Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy: Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues. Ed. Julia Annas. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1992. 201-219.

Irwin, Terence. Plato's Ethics. New York: Oxford U P, 1995.

Reeve, C. D. C. Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato's Republic. Princeton: Princeton U P, 1988.

Sinaiko, Herman. Love, Knowledge, and Discourse in Plato: Dialogue and Dialectic in Phaedrus, Republic, Parmenides. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1965.

Steinberger, Peter. "Who is Cephalus?" Political Theory 24 (May 1996): 172- 199.

Swearingen, C. Jan. Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies. New York: Oxford U P, 1991.

White, James Boyd. When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.

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