On the Limits of Law: Plato’s Minos

• In Event: The Ancient Conception of the Good

Abstract

An obvious starting point for any examination of law in the Platonic Corpus is the Minos, the only dialogue explicitly dedicated to the question of what is law. Throughout the Minos, Socrates speaks with an unnamed Comrade who is skeptical that law is natural rather than conventional. The Comrade’s conventionalism is based upon the manifest variability of law, that this variability demonstrates that law does not possess the unity and stability of nature. Most of the Minos is taken up with Socrates’ attempt to refute the Comrade’s conventionalism in order to restore his respect for law. To dissuade the Comrade of his conventionalism, Socrates sacrifices the correctness of his final definition of law in order to appease the Comrade’s opinions on law. Thus, for much of the Minos, Socrates’ final definition that, “law, then, wishes to be the discovery of what is,” is replaced by a definition of law as the unqualified discovery of what is. At a first glance then, the Minos can appear to be a frustratingly limited account of Socrates’ understanding of law. This paper will argue that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of the Minos. The dramatic action of the Minos points to the central tension between truth and opinion implied in Socrates’ final definition of law. Socrates’ prudent rule of Comrade serves as an example of the inherent limitations of law. It is only by reading the Minos with an eye towards unifying the argument and action of the dialogue that Socrates’ conception of law can begin to be understood

Author

• Luke Spitzley, Boston College