Working Group
“Triangulating Towards Socrates: The Socratic Circle and its Aftermath”
October 19, 2020 – Feb. 8, 2021
Organizers: Gabriel Danzig, James Redfield

Group fellows:
James Redfield, University of Chicago.
David Konstan, New York University.
Gabriel Danzig, Bar Ilan University.
David Johnson, University of Illinois, Carbondale.
Cloe Balla, University of Crete.
Olga Chernyakhovskaya, Bamberg University

Visiting scholar:
Dr. Rodrigo Illarraga, University of Buenos Aires

The research group held weekly seminars via Zoom. During January 17-21 there was an additional “week of talks” via Zoom. 

Our workshop brought together scholars working on different aspects of the Socratic corpus to explore new areas of research opened up by the comparative approach. The members of our research group are involved in four different specializations: Cloe Balla and James Redfield have a primary expertise in Plato; Dave Johnson, Olga Chernyakhovskaya, and Gabriel Danzig focus primarily on Xenophon; David Konstan and James Redfield have expertise in the entire range of classical literature; David Konstan and Alexander Kulik have expertise in the history and transmission of ideas.

The collaboration was extremely fruitful and led to several remarkable discoveries concerning Xenophon’s vision of arete (virtue). A fundamental discovery was that Xenophon almost never uses the term arete in the plural. This led us to note that Plato too makes very rare use of the plural — only fifteen times and almost never signifying the existence of many distinct virtues. Isocrates and then Aristotle brought the use of plural terminology into philosophical discourse. This is a major discovery because scholars commonly speak of the “virtues” in Plato and Xenophon, reflexively retrojecting the terminology from the later writers. Several of us are now working on the philosophical implications of these discoveries. One implication is that virtue is a unity composed of many parts, many “virtue-qualities,” and a further possible implication is that each person has his or her own collection of such qualities. Just as there is a virtue of men, of women, and of children, so too the virtue of an individual indicates that person’s peculiar collection of virtue-qualities.

Even more significantly, we found that Xenophon praises and discusses an extremely wide range of positive character traits. While the most important qualities may be something like qualities of character and mind, akin to traditional virtues, other things such as good birth and love of country can also be parts of a person’s virtue. Exploiting concepts derived from his expertise in the history of emotions, David Konstan produced a paper arguing that these diverse qualities do not fall under a single category. Gabriel Danzig produced a paper arguing that Xenophon anticipates some of Aristotle’s conceptions of virtue (including its being an acquired disposition or hexis), but disagrees with him on almost everything else, including the stability, pleasantness, and even the intermediate nature of such qualities.

We also produced studies of individual virtue-qualities. Dave Johnson produced a study of courage highlighting the ambivalence of the Socratic writers on this score and explaining the reasons for that ambivalence; he also examined Xenophon’s claim that Socrates had a “democratic” character, and argued that such a description reveals more about Socrates’ character than about his politics. Olga Chernyakhovskaya produced a paper exploring the intellectual dimension of piety, and another exploring the intentional aspect of friendship. Gabriel Danzig produced a paper on sophrosune arguing that for Xenophon it is primarily a quality of action,

while enkrateia is a quality of the soul. Chloe Bella explored the interaction of Socratic writings with other writers in the fourth century and revised papers on Plato’s Phaedo, and on the concept of philosophical wonder. James Redfield offered insights into philosophical conceptions of friendship and into the intellectual virtues as formulated by Aristotle. David Konstan wrote a paper on “Xenophon’s Subversive Socrates” which he later presented in the series sponsored by the International Society for Socratic Studies.

In addition to the lectures and other events, the fellows conducted weekly reading sessions on Xenophon’s works.  Apart from the specific accomplishments of this intense period of research, this interaction, along with occasional meetings in person, produced a new array of research interests that will guide its members’ research in the future. David Konstan has begun a project on the origin of the concept of virtue in ancient Greece. The reading group sparked Dave Johnson to begin a commentary on the fourth book of the Memorabilia. Gabriel Danzig began a project on Socrates and the so-called social virtues, using Aristotle’s discussions of these virtues to help elucidate Socrates’ behavior in both Plato and Xenophon.

Our group thus produced findings that are taking us in novel directions. But our work has also vindicated our original belief that study of a wider set of Socratic authors, including Xenophon, can help us uncover ethical views that reflect Socrates’ contribution without falling casually into classical virtue ethics as codified by Plato and Aristotle. This new research will help us better to understand the origins of virtue ethics, an approach of ongoing relevance in modern ethical theory. It may also help us sketch out a road not travelled in the classical philosophical tradition: an account of the qualities that make for the best sort of human life that is informed by Socratic reflection but does not restrict the best life to the life of the philosopher. 

Finally, the group engaged in preliminary discussions of the emotions in Xenophon, as a follow-up to the earlier workshop on virtues.  Various preliminary seminars, which were then in the planning stage, have already been given online, participants have been recruited, and themes discussed.