A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

Fictions of a Philosopher

The book is also an invaluable treasure trove of 'Socratic facts' - for example that there is a letter attributed to Plato declaring that some of the texts attributed to him were in fact written by Socrates - here not at all as we conventionally believe, eschewing the written form. Then there is the Socrates instructing a youthful Plato to destroy his attempts at writing poetry; the Socrates standing for a day and a night rooted to the spot, while others brought up mattresses to watch and take bets on the eccentric philosopher's next move; the 'sculptor's son who frittered away his inheritance while he denigrated earthly fathers in favour of the true father - the Good; the Janus Socrates, both the beginning and the end of philosophy -  and so many others.

"... paradoxically, it is precisely when the soul is closest to itself that Socrates' behaviour is most astonishing, fascinating and strangely disturbing. Like an uncanny double, he seems to appear and disappear at will, immobilising himself, mesmerising himself and others through some magic trick, like a sorcerer with more power to charm than the finest flute player of the most eloquent narrator. He is more powerful than Gorgias and his rhetoric, more powerful than Agathon, who hurls his Gorgon-like speeches at listeners to frighten them and to hide the vacuity of his own thought. 

Socrates' seductive sorcery, on the contrary, makes him appear to be immobilising himself in order to seek some divine wonder within as if he possessed some tremendous secret, some knowledge he would prefer to conceal from everyone; the presumed knowledge of a presumed master, which despite Socrates' professions of ignorance, the others persist in attempting to extract from him throgh a succesion of strategies."

In the book we are shown that there are the two 'Socrates' of Plato's dialogues, in the Symposium he is an elusive contradictory figure, a good and a bad twin, and there is the 'chimerical' Socrates, described by Nietzsche. (Sarah Kofman is a Nietzsche scholar and there is too much emphasis on his interpretations and writings here...  at times the book seems to be centred on the issue of whether or not Nietzsche overstates Socrates' commitment to rationality, turning him into a kind of Descartes.)

Then there are the Hegelian Socrates, 'two-faced', and performing the characteristic, historical Hegelian evolution dictated by destiny. Kierkegard's Socrates is seen "under an ironic lens" , drawing on a typically obscure Kierkegaardian earlier thesis 'the concept of irony', itself a reaction to Hegel... it goes round and round. - and the conclusion? "Hegel is wrong and right", and secondly that "Socrates is a seducer". This is an obscure discussion and one which I found unilluminating, but then I am outside the pat philosophical tradition, which is overtly exclusive and specialised.

The book concludes with Nietzsche's Socrates, with the well-known ambivalence of Nietzsche for Socrates both as hero and as traitor. This is the Socrates who in prison makes  his contemptible 'apology' to Asclepius, thereby revealing himself in his last hours "to be more Jew than Greek" and that "far from having restored Greece to health, 'virtue' and 'happiness' by means of rationality, he had served only as prelude to Christianity and decadence".