Work Group
Director: Professor Leo Catana,
Contact: catana@hum.ku.dk
The Aim of the Work Group
The aim of this work group is to develop a better understanding of the interpretations, evaluations and uses of the figure of Socrates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Despite the overwhelming interest in the ancient Socrates in recent years, much work is still to be done in regard to his reception in this period. Only a fraction of the hundreds of publications dedicated to Socrates and published between 1600 and 1800 have been studied. These texts are written in Latin and various vernacular languages, including German, English, French, Spanish and Russian. Latin texts are of special interest, because they transcended national borders.
The engagement with the figure of Socrates in this period had many facets, one of them being philological and historical. For instance, in 1699, Richard Bentley argued that the letters attributed to Socrates were not, in fact, written by him, or by Socratics, but by other authors in the Imperial period. Another facet regarded the debate about the alleged opposition between Socrates and the sophists, which departed from Gottfried Olearius’ 1709 edition of Philostratus’ De vitis sophistarum, and which continued well into the eighteenth century, affecting the understanding and evaluation of the sophists and Socrates. A third fact was religious and rooted in Plato’s statements in his dialogues about Socrates’ guardian spirit, his daimonion. Late ancient Platonists, for instance, had accommodated this concept in their metaphysical theories about intermediary natures, but these theories were contested in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theology and philosophy. In 1678, Ralph Cudworth claimed Socrates’ putative monotheism in his True Intellectual System of the Universe (IV.23), partly drawing on these late ancient Platonists. In 1742, the Lutheran minister and historian Jacob Brucker, in his influential Historia critica philosophiae, turned against Cudworth’s interpretation of Socrates and his school. Many other facets could be mentioned. It is clear, however, that the engagement with Socrates was far from an archival enterprise — he was a medium through which philosophy and theology proper were debated. The aim of the research group is to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon.
State-of-the-Art
Over the last decades, there has been a renewed interest in Socrates and his students, driven by scholars like Montuori (1974), Morrison (1987, 1994, 2011), Giannantoni (1990, 1995), Dorion (2009, 2010, 2013) and Boys-Stones and Rowe (2013). Likewise, research has expanded into the reception of Socrates among late ancient Platonists with the publication by Layne and Tarrant (2014).
This renewed interest in Socrates has also resulted into several studies in the reception of Socrates in the early modern period, implying that Böhm’s 1929 study of Socrates in the eighteenth century has now been surpassed in several respects. In less than ten years, three companions to Socrates have appeared, all of which include essays on the reception of Socrates in the early modern period: Kamtekar and Ahbel-Rappe’s Companion to Socrates (2009), Morrison’s Cambridge Companion to Socrates (2011), and Bussanich and Smith’s Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates (2012). Each of these companions comprises one or several essays on the reception of Socrates. Taken together, they cover his reception in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Renaissance Italy (e.g. Ficino), eighteenth-century France (e.g. Diderot) and England (e.g. Cooper), nineteenth-century Germany (Schleiermacher) and Denmark (Kierkegaard). Finally, in 2019, Moore published Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Socrates, which covers parts of the reception in the Renaissance and the early modern period, but which still leaves many gaps in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century reception.
The reception of Socrates in the early modern period has not been covered in the otherwise excellent histories of philosophy dealing with the period 1600-1800 (e.g. Garber and Ayers (1998), Haakonssen (2006)). This is understandable, as far as Socrates belongs antiquity, but it leaves us with a problem: Why did early modern philosophers and theologians take such a huge interest in Socrates, if their interest were reducible to archival curiosity? Could it be that the very act of interpreting Socrates was a way of philosophizing that has escaped us so far, because we have approached this material with an inadequate understanding of the dynamics in the history of philosophy in these centuries?
Activities in the Work Group
The work group will hold two annual meetings from 2021 — the first will be held in Copenhagen during fall 2021. It is headed by associate professor Leo Catana, Section of Philosophy, University of Copenhagen, and supported by The International Society for Socratic Studies. For more information, please contact Leo Catana (catana@hum.ku.dk).
Director of the Work Group
Leo Catana
Associate Professor
Section of Philosophy
Department of Communication
University of Copenhagen
Email: catana@hum.ku.dk
References
Böhm, Benno (1966). Sokrates im Achtzehnten Jahrhundert. First published in 1929. Neumünster: Karl Wachholtz Verlag.
Boys-Stones, George, and Christopher Rowe (2013). The Circle of Socrates. Readings in the First-Generation Socratics. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
Bussanich, John, and Nicholas D. Smith (eds) (2013). The Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Dorion, Louis-André (2009). ‘Xenophon’s Socrates’, in A Companion to Socrates, eds Rachana Kamtekar and Sara Ahbel-Rappe. West Sussex: Blackwell, pp. 93-109.
Dorion, Louis-André (2010). ‘Introduction’, in Xenophon, Mémorables. Livre 1, 3rd ed., Greek text established by Michele Bandini, French translation by Louis-André Dorion. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, pp. vii-cclii.
Dorion, Louis-André (2013). L’Autre Socrate. Études sur les écrits socratiques de Xénophon. Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Garber, Daniel, and M. Ayers (eds) (1998). The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, eds, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Giannantoni, G. (ed.) (1990). Socratis et Socraticorum reliquiae, 4 vols. Naples: Bibliopolis.
Giannantoni, G., et al. (1995). La traditizione socratica. Naples: Biblipolis.
Haakonssen, Knud (ed.) (2006). The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kamtekar, Rachana, and Ahbel-Rappe, Sara (eds) (2009). A Companion to Socrates. West Sussex: Blackwell.
Layne, Danielle A., and Harold Tarrant (eds) (2014). The Neoplatonic Socrates. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Levitin, Dimitri (2015). Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science. Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Montuori, Mario (1974). Socrate. Fisiologia di un mito. Florence: Sansoni.
Montuori, Mario (1981). Socrates. Physiology of a Man. English translation by J. M. P. and M. Langdale. Amstertdam: J. C. Gieben.
Morrison, Donald (1987). ‘On Professor Vlastos’ Xenophon’: Ancient Philosophy 7, pp. 9-22.
Morrison, Donald (1994). ‘Xenophon’s Socrates as Teacher’, in The Socratic Movement, ed. Paul Vander Waerdt. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Morrison, Donald (ed.) (2011). Cambridge Companion to Socrates. New York: Cambridge University Press.