This text is part of:
View text chunked by:
Table of Contents:
41. τοὺς δὲ ἀνδρείους ὡς οὐ θαρραλέοι εἰσίν. The οὐ
after ὡς is due to a confusion between (1) τοὺς δὲ ἀνδρείους ὡς
οὐ θαρραλέοι εἰσίν, οὐδαμοῦ ἐπέδειξας and (2) οἱ δὲ ἀνδρεῖοι ὡς
θαρραλέοι εἰσίν, τὸ ἐμὸν ὁμολόγημα, οὐδαμοῦ κτλ. The insertion of
οὐ is the more natural because after verbs of refuting and the
like the object clause gives what is maintained and not what is
refuted, whence ἐλέγχειν ὡς οὐ, ἀντιλέγειν ὡς οὐ etc.
45. καὶ ἐν τούτῳ οἴει κτλ. Protagoras ignores Socrates'
third proposition in 350B(25-30), where it is shown that θάρρος
without ἐπιστήμη is not ἀνδρεία; see next note.
48. πρῶτον μὲν γὰρ κτλ., i.e. you might as well argue
(1) οἱ ἰσχυροί are δυνατοί, (2) οἱ ἐπιστήμονες are δυνατοί, therefore
οἱ ἐπιστήμονες are ἰσχυροί. This would only be correct if for
(1) we substituted οἱ δυνατοί are ἰσχυροί. To make Protagoras'
picture of Socrates' argument complete, we should have to add
(3) none who are δυνατοί without ἐπιστήμη are ἰσχυροί—but this
is not true, whereas Socrates' third proposition is. The completed picture therefore fails to represent correctly Socrates'
reasoning in each of its steps, but none the less are Protagoras'
objections strictly relevant, and indeed fatal to Socrates' conclusion as expressed in 350C(33-6), and that is why Socrates
makes no reply.
Plato. Protagoras. J. Adam & A. M. Adam. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. 1893.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.