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For the last thirty years or more publications on Socrates have become a major growth industry. Its centre is the USA; and much of it has been occasioned by engagement with the work of Gregory Vlastos, conceivably the single most influential writer on ancient Greek philosophy in the English-speaking world in the twentieth century. A tricky area for US citizens is Socrates' political stance. Probably there would be fairly wide agreement among scholars that the principal motive behind the prosecution which led to Socrates' death in 399 bc was political animus against someone who had had close associations with Critias, leading member of the junta which overthrew the Athenian democracy in 403 bc. The assumption underpinning the formal charges brought against him will have been that Socrates was guilty by association, even if he had not engaged in political activity himself.

This chapter addresses a controversial issue that arises from Socrates' speech. If the human good — the highest virtue — is contemplative activity, then is there room in this account for other persons and, if so, in what form? This question has become a central one for the Symposium. Gregory Vlastos argued that the ascent to the form of beauty instrumentalizes other persons as unworthy of love for their own sake, and nowhere indicates that the philosopher's creative activity will enrich the lives of others. This chapter argues that Socrates' account is still firmly anchored in an account of interpersonal relationships and their role in a flourishing human life.

This chapter analyses Gregory Vlastos' interpretation of the Socratic problem in order to establish Plato's subjective credentials. It argues that the Platonic invention or his series of dialogues is subject to the Socratic event, which was extensively and symptomatically played out in the Apology and resolved in the Republic. It criticises Vlastos' separation of Socrates and Plato and shows that the Phaedo is a meditation on the proper course a subject faithful to the production of truths must take in order to realise the place of a non-sophistic education.

This chapter addresses questions on the relation of the historical Socrates and his philosophy to the Socrates of the dialogues, on whether the philosophy in the dialogues—Socrates' or Plato's—developed in any way, on the relation of the literary form of the dialogue to any putative philosophy found therein, and on how two apparently self-revealing passages in the Platonic corpus (Phaedrus 274C–277A and Seventh Letter 341C–D) impact our understanding of the dialogues in general. As such, the chapter first examines the “Socratic Problem” before turning to the views of some outstanding proponents of a putative “Socratic philosophy”—Gregory Vlastos, Terry Penner, and Christopher Rowe.

This chapter argues that Plato's singular difficulty in and by the constitution of the Republic was in maintaining this subversive and revolutionary education of the educators within the configuration of the new form of the state. It explains that this problem resulted from his attempts to design a curricular structure for maintaining this education and in so doing made a particular form of representation ‘not appear’. It highlights the differences between Alan Badiou and Gregory Vlastos' interpretations of Plato's dialogues.

This chapter reviews the book Socrates, Ironist, and Moral Philosopher (1991), by Gregory Vlastos. According to Alcibiades, Socrates's most remarkable trait is to be “similar to no human being, past or present ... This man is so strange, he and his speeches too, that you could search and search and find nobody near him.” Vlastos's book begins from the conviction that Socrates's strangeness is “the key to his philosophy.” Vlastos explores the rigor of Socrates's arguments, the depth of his moral philosophy, his complex relationship to Athenian ethical traditions, and his rational religion. His discussion of Socratic irony carefully disentangles two very different meanings of the Greek ancestor of our word “irony”: “deception” and “saying the opposite of what the hearer is to understand.” Vlastos contends that Socrates was the first Greek thinker to reject retaliation as unjust in all circumstances. He also addresses the relationship between virtue and eudaimonia—which he translates as “happiness”—in Socrates's moral theory.