Self-Knowledge and Self-Control in Plato’s Charmides

This chapter examines the treatment of self-knowledge in Plato’s Charmides. The chapter argues that Critias’ proposal that temperance is self-knowledge, and its subsequent examination by Socrates, initially offers the reader a picture of self-knowledge as a reflexive self-awareness of the content of mental states. However, the initial discussion between Socrates and Critias presents the reader with a tension between the dual demands placed on self-knowledge in that dialogue. On the one hand, since self-knowledge is directed inward, towards one’s conscious states in acting temperately, it appears to be presented as reflexive. On the other, since, as a kind of knowledge, self-knowledge must be about something, and so dependent on the object it is directed towards, it is presented as exhibiting the characteristic of ‘objective intentionality’. A clue to the tension’s resolution, it is argued, can be found by considering the more standard understanding of temperance as self-control, and in Charmides’ characterization of temperance as a kind of ‘quietude’.

Control (management) · Dual (grammatical number) · Epistemology · Intentionality · Linguistics · Object (grammar) · Reflexivity · Self · Self-knowledge · Social science · Sociology · SOCRATES · Artificial Intelligence · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Computer Science · Medieval and Classical Philosophy · Philosophy · Psychology

• The Virtue of Agency

  Christopher Moore•Virtue of Agency•2023

  Add to list