Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-dfsvx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-27T04:51:38.989Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Socrates of Athens, Philosopher of Religion*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

D. S. Hutchinson
D. S. Hutchinson
Affiliation:
Trinity College, University of Toronto
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In The Religion of Socrates, Mark McPherran offers an extended discussion of selected evidence about Socrates's philosophy of religion. Relevant passages from Plato's Euthyphro and Apology are taken to be authentic reports of Socrates's own thinking, and are commented on at considerable length. The interpretation that emerges is supplemented by evidence from other works by Plato (treated more cautiously) and from Xenophon's Memorabilia (treated more hesitantly). The ten-page bibliography is useful, and the index of passages is especially valuable. But McPherran's evidence is tendentiously selected, and so his depiction cannot be trusted as a portrayal of Socrates himself.

Type
Critical Notices/Études critiques
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , Summer 1999 , pp. 601 - 606
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1999

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 For a decisive refutation of the concept of a “best manuscript,” see pp. 131–37 of Hermann Fraenkel's “Einleitung zur kritischen Ausgabe der Argonautika des Apollonios,” in Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Gottingen, Philologische-historische Klasse, Dritte Folge, #55 (1964); most of his arguments apply, mutatis mutandis, to source criticism.Google Scholar