Plato's Hippias Minor

Philosophers accuse Socrates of advancing unfair if not fallacious arguments in Plato's Hippias Minor more than most other dialogues. In Hippias Minor, Socrates appears to defend the trickster Odysseus, and in the course of doing so he argues for outrageous claims: the honest person and the liar are no different, and the good person is one who does wrong voluntarily. In Plato's Hippias Minor: The Play of Ambiguity, Zenon Culverhouse argues that Socrates' questionable behavior is no coincidence in a dialogue about deception and that the questions for Socrates are what counts as deception and how it reflects one’s excellence. More broadly, the dialogue is about the relationship between the speaker and what is said, between agent and action. Thus, the dialogue marks an important stage in Socrates' thinking about virtue and voluntary action. As for Plato's portrait of Socrates, Culverhouse argues that the dialogue further defines the sometimes thin line between Socrates and his contemporaries, the sophists. Rather than exploiting ambiguity in key terms of the argument to trip up his opponent, Socrates playfully explores these ambiguities to illuminate Hippias' (and perhaps our own) serious commitments about human excellence.

"This is an invaluable commentary on Plato’s Hippias Minor that every student of the dialogue will want by her side.", "Zenon Culverhouse has done an exemplary job of scholarship in this book, engaging not only with the very diverse scholarly treatments of the Hippias Minor, but also with the nuances of both argument and humor in the text itself. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this important, but also in many ways puzzling Platonic dialogue.", "By concentrating on Plato’s use of two different words for 'better,' one applied in a moral sense, the other confined to a superior capacity to do something whether or not doing it is immoral, Zenon Culverhouse offers an elegant solution to Plato’s problematic little dialogue Hippias Minor.", "A well-argued and elucidating treatment of one of Plato’s most puzzling dialogues. Culverhouse successfully establishes the Hippias Minor as a foundational text for understanding Socratic philosophy."

Zenon Culverhouse is associate professor of philosophy at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio.