Socrates Was Not Naive

The Socrates of the early and presumably more historical Platonic documents is sometimes portrayed as naive.

The thinking is this: Socrates identified knowledge with virtue, and thus inferred that people only do wrong things because they are insufficiently well informed. With that naive view of human nature Plato also began, so the early dialogs are faithful to it. But as Plato grew older and wiser, he modified this view and allowed for untamed passions in the human soul that cause trouble not attributable to ignorance. [See the angry fellow portrayed above.]

And the "Socrates" who continued to serve as Plato's mouthpiece represented this chastened view.

But the story is not faithful to the texts. Socrates, even the Socrates portrayed in the dialogues often used to tell this story, was never that naive.

A discussion: https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/appetite-anger-harmonized-knowledge-talking-rachana-kamtekar/

That's the review, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, of Rachana Kamtekar's PLATO'S MORAL PSYCHOLOGY.

I discovered that review at around the same time that I discovered another review, of a very different book with which Kamtekar's may deserve to be bracketed.

Colin Marshall has written COMPASSIONATE MORAL REALISM, published by Oxford University Press. Marshall contends that virtue and knowledge are intimately connected. People who are insufficiently moral are not connected with the world -- the world around them consisting of vulnerable and suffering creatures -- and, not being connected with it, they don't know it.

SO it isn't, "we should know in order to be good" but "we should be good in order to know."

Here's a review of that one:

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/compassionate-moral-realism/

Lerner, the reviewer, thinks there are some holes in Marshall's case. But they are holes one would expect to be able to find in a view both novel and sweeping. It may be a worthwhile project for some PhD candidates to get to work patching the holes.