From the Beginning to Plato

SOCRATES AND THE BEGINNINGS OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY 299
seem to have moral views that rival Socrates’, while the fragments of
Democritus exhibit a moral theory.
Of course, part of the difficulty here is that the notion of having or practising a
moral philosophy is quite vague. Does it suffice merely to entertain moral
propositions? If so, then moral philosophy began long before Socrates. On the
other hand, if it requires something else, what else? Answering this question is
both difficult and perhaps uninteresting. But even if we were to answer it, we
would still be a long way from confirming or disconfirming the Ciceronian
tradition. To do this we would need to rehearse the entire history of philosophy
up to Socrates focusing on whether any of Socrates’ predecessors or
contemporaries had or practised a moral philosophy so defined. Such a task is
obviously well beyond anything that can be accomplished in an essay of this son.
Consequently, I will not attempt it. Instead, I propose to focus on a characteristic
feature of Socratic moral philosophy, a feature that may have motivated the
Ciceronian tradition. For morality, according to Socrates, is a knowledge or
expertise to be practised and studied just like any other knowledge or expertise.
What distinguishes it from other instances of knowledge and expertise is its
object: roughly, the good. This is the message at the core of Socratic philosophy,
a message Socrates believed he was called upon to spread. Whether such a
message is new to the intellectual scene of fifth century Greece, or if so, whether
that justifies crediting Socrates with the origins of moral philosophy, I leave for
others to decide. My goal here is to come to grips with the substance of Socratic
moral philosophy, whatever its intellectual ancestors and contemporaries may
have been.
THE SOCRATIC PROBLEM
Before beginning this task we must address an issue that all discussions of
Socratic philosophy must face: Whom am I referring to when I use the name
‘Socrates’? The question arises because the historical individual that goes by this
name (and who was the mentor of Plato, an associate of Xenophon, Alcibiades
and Chaerephon, and general pest on the streets of Athens in the latter part of the
fifth century BC) apparently wrote nothing. Our knowledge of the philosophical
views of this individual derives primarily from four distinct sources:
Aristophanes, who wrote a comedy entitled the Clouds in which Socrates is a
major figure; 4 Xenophon, who wrote a variety of Socratic works, perhaps the
most important of which is the Memorabilia which purports to be a record of a
number of Socratic conversations5 ; Plato, who wrote twenty dialogues in which
Socrates is the primary speaker6 ; and Aristotle, who refers to Socrates over forty
times throughout his corpus. 7 This alone would pose no problem; we think we
know quite a bit about Themistocles or Pericles and yet we possess none of their
writings either. The problem arises because the portraits of Socrates painted by
our first three sources are so different. 8 According to Aristophanes, Socrates is a
sophistic natural philosopher who was willing to teach anyone who would pay for