Joanna asked:

Does the Socrates of Plato's early dialogues have a distinct method of philosophising? Does he
establish any positive philosophical conclusion?

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What is most notable about the characters forced to submit to Socrates relentless questioning in
Plato's early dialogues is their lackof doubt. Such as the General in Lacheswho wants his son to
acquire 'courage', who has never questioned what courage is, or the young man in Euthyphro
convinced that it is 'piety' that demands he prosecute his own father for the murder of a servant.

The early dialogues all follow the same basic formula. Various attempts are made to define the moral
concept in question, but none is deemed satisfactory, and the participants go away disappointed.

I used to go along with the idea that Socrates' aim in these dialogues is not to arrive at a definitionof
courage, or piety, or temperance, or virtue that covers all possible cases, every example that we can
think of, but rather to appreciate the need for constant re-examination of our moral beliefs, and our
ideas about what constitutes a human 'virtue'. Somehow, that no longer seems to ring true.

Looking at the dialogues now, it seems to me more likely that Socrates — the historical Socrates
whose practice we must assume is more or less faithfully recorded in Plato's early dialogues — really
did think that definitions of the virtues could, in principle, be found. But these would not be definitions
that you would find in any dictionary, taking up just one or two lines, like 'Courage is standing fast and
not running away in the face of the enemy'. Socrates, who was convinced that human beings were
capable of moral knowledge, that philosophical inquiry could reveal the basis of this knowledge, tried
and, to his disappointment, failed.

I therefore do not accept the popular view that Socrates was merely being ironicin claiming that he
'knew nothing'. To be sure, it may have been only very rarely that a respondent ambushed him with a
new idea, or a definition he had not already thought of and rejected. But he really did think that there
was something out there to be known, and that one day might be known. — And, for what it's worth,
so do I.

Geoffrey Klempner