Knowledge and Voluntary Injustice in the Hippias Minor

Plato’s Hippias Minor proposes a thesis that I call the Superiority of the Voluntary Wrongdoer (SVW), which states that the person doing something wrong voluntarily is better than the person doing it wrong involuntarily. This claim has long unsettled scholars, who have tried to determine whether Socrates is serious about SVW or disavows it. The primary strategy among interpreters is to appeal to Socrates’ prior commitment to the “Socratic paradox” that no one does injustice voluntarily; with the Socratic paradox in the background, it is argued, we can better understand how Socrates treats SVW. In this paper, I aim to show that the Hippias Minor points us towards a different understanding of SVW and the Socratic paradox, with implications for their role both in the dialogue and in Plato’s philosophy as a whole. My first step towards this understanding is to consider the distinctive methodology of the Hippias Minor. Socrates’ attitude towards his and Hippias’ arguments is characterized by πλάνη, or wavering; I argue that this wavering shows that Socrates wants to determine how he might accommodate what is compelling about both his and Hippias’ positions, rather than choosing one over the other. To that end, I look more closely at what each interlocutor proposes in the dialogue, concluding that many of their primary commitments are shared by both interlocutors and do not contradict. We do not, then, need to throw out SVW, and we can grasp the true role of the Socratic paradox: it is not axiomatic but a conditional conclusion of the dialogue, and Socrates’ attempt to reconcile SVW with Hippias’ arguments provides reasons and motivation for accepting it. Accordingly, we cannot assume that the Socratic paradox will be in place, and we should look for some indication in the Hippias Minor as to why it could hold. I argue that the dialogue provides a framework for doing so, by taking steps towards a new understanding of knowledge (epistēmē) that can support the Socratic paradox. These moves put the Hippias Minor in the position of beginning to examine and develop key ideas in Plato’s ethics and epistemology.

Platone, Ippia Minore

In spite of its brevity and its aporetical ending, Plato’s Hippias minor is worth considering, for it deals with relevant questions such as falsehood, its relationship to wrongdoing and the more complex problem of voluntary and involuntary action. Moreover, the central section of the dialogue is devoted to the exegesis of the Homeric poems and in particular of the Iliad, developing a comparison between Achilles and Odysseus and thus offering important evidence of Plato’s early interest in poetic production. The aim of the present work is to give a new critical edition of the Greek text with Italian translation, preceded by a general introduction and followed by a continuous lemmatic commentary in order to provide a systematic analysis of the dialogue in every aspect.

L’Iliade et l’Odyssée, un matériau fertile pour la pensée philosophique : le bon usage d’Homère dans l’Hippias Mineur

In Hippias Minor, Plato does not merely condemn Homer as a reference in ethical matters. He opposes two uses of poetry when it comes to referring to and giving meaning to it: poetry as a source of knowledge admitted and frozen by tradition, ethically normative, and poetry as a source of philosophical questions, conducive to ethical reflection. The debate shows that Socrates’ view of Homer, as well as his Homeric point of view, allow us to ask good and often paradoxical questions about the link between truth, falsity, knowledge and calculation, which are essential for those who want to build solid ethics. The dialogue then shows how the philosopher enriches the meaning of the Homeric text.

THE HIPPIAS MINOR AND THE TRADITIONS OF HOMERIC CRITICISM

Homer plays an important role in the discussion in the Hippias Minor of voluntary and involuntary action and their relation to knowledge and goodness. This paper argues that the Hippias Minor sheds light on the Homeric criticism of the late fifth and early fourth centuries, and that it looks forward to, and significantly influenced, the tradition of Hellenistic and later Homeric criticism, for which our best witnesses are the Homeric scholia. This article considers Socrates' presentation of Achilles and Odysseus in the Hippias Minor and makes the case, more strongly than it has been made before, that this dialogue was an important influence on the later critical tradition.