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The Apology of Isocrates: The Defense of Philosophy in the "Antidosis"

Sat, November 8, 9:45 to 11:45am, Warwick Hotel Rittenhouse Square, Floor: 3rd, Juniper Room

Abstract

Disinterest in Isocrates among political scientists is due in part, no doubt, to his insistence that a sound political education is not a matter of scientific knowledge (epistēmē), which as such could be, to quote Thucydides, "a possession for all time," but concerns rather the sound and expedient formation of opinion (doxa) at the critical moment (kairos). Training toward this end, says Isocrates, is philosophy; and philosophy, to be sure, is the name he consistently gives to his own activity.

Different as his definition of philosophy may seem from Plato’s, Isocrates is the only writer said by Plato’s Socrates in the “Phaedrus” to be a philosophic thinker. Hence we must wonder whether the difference between Plato and Isocrates on the meaning of philosophy is one of substance or merely of rhetoric. What is certain, however, is that Isocrates, like Plato, concerned himself throughout his writings with the defense of philosophy at a historical moment at which philosophy, in Isocrates’s own words, was “in a mortal condition” and in danger of becoming “hated still more.”

The “Antidosis,” Isocrates’s longest and most complex work, presents his imagined courtroom defense of his own life and career against charges of corrupting the youth. But the second half of the work turns to an explicit defense of philosophy itself and contains by far Isocrates’s most elaborate discussion of philosophy as such. This essay presents an interpretation of that passage in the service of a broader project to understand the meaning of philosophy in Isocrates’s thought.

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