MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W2733168888 · doi:10.14195/2183-4105_24

Just how socratic are Plato's "Socratic" Dialogues?

2002· article· en· W2733168888 on OpenAlexaff
Christopher Rowe

Bibliographic record

VenuePlato Journal · 2002
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicClassical Philosophy and Thought
Canadian institutionsDiscovery Air (Canada)
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSocratic methodSocratic questioningPhilosophySOCRATESLiteratureEpistemologyArt

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Kahn's Critique of Vlastos's SocratesPlato and the Socratic Dialogue is, among other things, a sustained attack on the hypothesis of a 'Socratic' period in Plato.Two main arguments in favour of the hypothesis are usually advanced; the two are closely interrelated.First, there is the sort of argument that we find developed in Vlastos's book on Socrates.I have been speaking of a Socrates in Plato.There are two of them.In different segments of Plato's corpus two philosophers bear that name.The individual remains the same.But in different dialogues he pursues philosophies so different that they could not have been depicted as cohabiting the same brain throughout unless it had been the brain of a schizophrenic.They are so diverse in content and method that they contrast as sharply with one another as with any third philosophy you care to mention, beginning with Aristotle's [1].1 This is, as Vlastos says, a 'large claim', but a (reasonably) clear one: the two philosophies in question are so different that no sane mind could go on for long entertaining both.According to Vlastos and many others, there is a very clear break ('in content and method') between two 'segments' of the Platonic corpus which needs explanation -and one way of explaining it is indeed that they reflect the workings of two different minds.The explanation is all the more tempting because there are, in a sense, already two people there: the author and his character, and we know that the one, and the original of the other, were philosophers.Of course, as Vlastos himself admits, the internal evidence of the dialogues themselves would also be consistent with Plato's having first developed one of the two philosophies, then the other: 'there is no intrinsic reason why both of these philosophies, despite their polar differences, could not have been Plato's own original creations at different periods of his life' (p.81).This is where the second main argument for a Socratic phase in Plato comes in: other authors, notably Aristotle and Xenophon, positively identify differences between Socrates' philosophy and Plato's; and these differences happen to show remarkable similarities to the alleged differences between Vlastos's first segment of the Platonic corpus and his second.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.007
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.016
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.010
Threshold uncertainty score0.038

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0070.016
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0060.038
Scholarly communication0.0100.014
Open science0.0010.003
Research integrity0.0030.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.155
GPT teacher head0.222
Teacher spread0.067 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations4
Published2002
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venuePlato JournalSame topicClassical Philosophy and ThoughtFrench-language works237,207