Intellectualism and the Method of Hypothesis in Plato’s Early Dialogues

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents a reading of Plato’s early dialogues as organized around the hypothesis that virtue consists in a kind of technê, craft. That ‘intellectualist’ hypothesis is sophistic in origin, and neither Plato nor his Socrates is committed to it: the purpose of the early dialogues is to subject it to philosophical scrutiny, using the method of hypothesis outlined in the Meno and Phaedo. Recurrent questions such as whether virtue can be taught and what knowledge it might consist in emerge on this reading as ‘consequences’ of the hypothesis by which it can be tested. That desire is for the good stands to the hypothesis as a ‘higher hypothesis’, and complicates the inquiry by generating further consequences of its own. The thesis of the paper is that this hypothetical reading gives an account of the method and spirit of the early dialogues which better captures the evidence than the standard reading, on which intellectualism is a doctrinal commitment of Plato’s Socrates himself.