The Unity of Virtue
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10694693 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Terry Penner (0000-0002-8234-8902, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1973 |
| Volume | 82 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 35 |
| Publication date | 1973-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Philosophical Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8108 • E-ISSN: 1558-1470 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2184238 |
| OpenAlex | W2323562842 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 43 |
T HE THESIS of this paper is highly unusual, yet it is perfectly straightforward. It is that when Socrates said Virtue is one, he meant it quite literally! True, the conventional philosophical wisdom-which has infected classicist interpreters of Socrates as well as philosophical interpreters-renders a literal reading of the doctrine quite impossible. But the conventional philosophical wisdom is both mistaken as philosophy and anachronistic as exegesis of Socrates.So there is every reason to look around for an alternative interpretation of Socrates-and what more natural than that he meant what he said? My task, then, is both philosophical and exegetical. I concentrate on the philosophical half of the task in Sections I and II of the paper, setting forth the philosophical assumptions which have traditionally been made and showing that it is unnecessary to make them, and sketching in by contrast the alternative interpretation I am proposing. In Section III, I show how, on the literal interpretation, Socrates' arguments in the Protagoras purporting to show that Virtue is one are much improved over what they have usually been supposed to be. In Section IV, the literal interpretation is extended to the Laches and the Charmides, and the single entity in question, virtue, identified with the knowledge (science) of good and evil. The further characterization of this single entity, and of its place in a Socratic theory of action and motivation, is promised for a later paper
Analytic philosophy · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · General interest · Virtue · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Philosophy
Virtue Without Gender in Socrates
Precis of The Therapy of Desire
Augustine on the Unity and the Interconnection of the Virtues
Socrates on Self-Improvement
Courage and Comedy in Plato's Laches
Plato on Education and Art
How Socrates Can Make Both Pleasure and Virtue the Chief Good
Plato's Metaphysics
Plato on Love
Socrates, Pleasure, and Value
Socrates, the primary question, and the unity of virtue
Euthyphro 10a2-11b1
Plato in his Time and Place
Plato and Platonism
The Structure of Enquiry in Plato's Early Dialogues
Socratic Piety In The Euthyphro
Socrates on the Parts of Virtue
Plato's Meno
Plato's Philosophy of Language
The Oxford Handbook of Plato
Plato's Introduction of Forms
Plato's Epistemology
Virtue in the cave
Plato's Utopia Recast
The Sophist on Statements, Predication, and Falsehood
Trials of Reason
The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought
Socrates' Pursuit of Definitions
Why Justice and Holiness are Similar
Disunity of Virtue
The Unity of the Ideal Virtues
Socrates, the ‘What is F-ness?’ Question, and the Priority of Definition
Perceived News Media Importance
Exploring the “unity” of the virtues
The Ethics of the Family in Seneca
Ignorance in Plato’s Protagoras
What do the Arguments in the Protagoras Amount to
Can virtue be unified? An Aristotelian justification on “unity of virtue”
Prudence and morality
Unity of the intellectual virtues
What Socrates Says, and Does Not Say
The Argument of the Protagoras
Plato'sProtagorasand the Frontier of Genre Research
| Unique citing works | 43 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,86 |
| Citation span | 1976 - 2025 (50) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 40 |