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'Doing Business With The Gods'

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Steven A.M. Burns
Steven A.M. Burns*
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, B3H 3J5Canada
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Extract

Plato's Euthyphro is a dialogue about the virtue of piety. It is also one of the aporetic dialogues, ending in apparent failure to discover what piety is. It is common to understand the dialogue as teaching lessons about other things, about definition, for instance, or about the logic of refutation. About piety, however, it is thought to teach us only negatively, showing a few of the many things which piety is not.

My thesis, on the contrary, is that there is a positive account of the nature of piety in the dialogue; it is, moreover, an account which cannot be separated from the other lessons which the dialogue teaches. I shall find it necessary to expose the structure of the logical lessons in order to develop my account of the holy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , June 1985 , pp. 311 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1985

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References

1 It has been suggested that Euthyphro is a rustic parody of the characters familiar from Greek tragedy who are driven by piety to act impiously against a blood relative (Orestes, for instance). See Egan, Rory B. ‘Tragic Piety in Plato's Euthyphro,’ Dionysius, 7 (1983) 17–32.Google Scholar This brings out the importance of filial piety as a component of the conventional understanding of ‘hosion.’ It also allows Egan to read the dialogue as a comic attack on the poets’ accounts of piety.

2 Geach, Peter ‘The Moral Law and the Law of God,’ in God and the Soul (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1969), 117–29,Google Scholar and ‘Plato's Euthyphro, An Analysis and Commentary,’ The Monist, SO (1966) 369-82.

3 This is the burden of Maurice Cohen's thesis, in ‘The Aporias in Plato's Early Dialogues,’ Journal of the History of Ideas, 23 (1962) 163-74.

4 Allen, R.E. Plato's ‘Euthyphro’ and the Earlier Theory of Forms (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1970).Google Scholar I use Allen's translation when I quote from the Euthyphro. For other quotations from Plato I shall use the translations in Edith Hamilton and Cairns, Huntington eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato (New York: Random House 1961).Google Scholar

5 Ibid. 6

6 Pace Allen, who says: ‘Unfortunately, there is not a word in the Euthyphro to suggest that it is the moral duty of men to become like god, or gods.’ Ibid. 8.

7 Ibid. 34

8 This is argued in detail by Cohen, S.M. ‘Socrates on the Definition of Piety: Euthyphro 10A-11B,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy, 9 (1971),CrossRefGoogle Scholar reprinted in Vlastos, G. ed., The Philosophy of Socrates (Garden City, NY 1971) 158–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Brown, J.H. ‘The Logic of the Euthyphro 10A-11B,’ The Philosophical Quarterly, 54 (1964) 1–14;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Rose, Lynn E. ‘A Note on the Euthyphro, 10-11,’ Phronesis, 10 (1965) 149–50;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hall, J.C. ‘Plato: Euthyphro 10A1-11A10,’ The Philosophical Quarterly, 70 (1968) 1–11;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and MacKinnon, D.M and Meynell, Hugo ‘The Euthyphro Dilemma,’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 46 (1972) 211–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 C.C.W. Taylor has also directed our attention to these pages (11b ff.), treating them as a further example of Plato at work on the (unity of the) virtues. See ‘The End of the Euthyphro,’ Phronesis, 27 (1982) 109-18. Compare MacKinnon (1972), who also leads discussion away from the third definition.

10 This points forward to the ‘theory’ of Forms as causes which is proposed at Phaedo 100a ff. Note, too, that the fourth definition focusses on piety as a virtue of persons, setting aside the other senses canvassed earlier.