PHI 001

Lecture #2
4/2/15

Most of the writings of Plato (427-347 BC) consists of dialogues between

Socrates and various residents of and travelers to Athens.

Euthyphros Case
-

A servant in Euthyphros family had drunkenly killed one of the household

slaves.
Euthyphros father bound him and threw him in a ditch, leaving him there
while he sent a messenger to seek advice from a seer about how to proceed.
Before the father returned, the servant had died in the ditch.
Euthyphro claimed that his father had murdered the servant, and that the
pious thing to do is to prosecute a murderer.
His reason was that while it is commonly believed that it is impious to
prosecute ones kin, he knows that it is pious, because he knows what piety
is.

The Socratic Elenchus

-

In the remainder of the dialogue, Socrates challenges Euthyphros claim to

know what piety is.
His method is a kind of cross-examination called in Greek elenchus.
Method consists of several steps. SHOWN BELOW
- A thesis is enunciated(in the present case, a definition of piety).
Socrates asks questions relevant to the thesis, securing his interlocuters
agreement on points that will later be used against him
Socrates then shows how the combination of the thesis and the further
agreed-upon points leads to a contradiction or other absurdity
A new thesis might be stated, and the same process applied to it.
What Piety Is

The remainder of the dialogue consists of the application of the method to a

number of theses about what kind of thing piety is.

Before the first thesis is stated, Socrates secures Euthyphros agreement

about what is required in describing a piety as a kind of thing.
Everything that is pious is the opposite of everything that is impious.
The impious is the same and alike in all impious actions, whether murder or
anything else.
So, its opposite, the pious, is the same and alike in all pious actions.
The impious presents us with one form of appearance, in so far as it is
impious (and the same holds for the pious).
Missed

How Not to Describe a Kind of Thing

-

Euthyphros first account of piety is that it is doing what he is doing, I.e.,

prosecuting a wrongdoer, no matter who he may be.
He backs up his claim by appealing to the behavior of the (just) god Zeus,
who punished his father for unjustly swallowing his sons.
Socrates points out that there are other pious actions besides prosecution of
wrongdoers.
And Euthyphro had agreed that the description of what piety is requires a
single form that applies to all pious actions.
It must be noted that here Socrates slips in a powerful new feature to the
notion of a form, that it makes things the kind of things they are.
So, Socrates asks for a description of what piety and impiety are, and a new
thesis is required.

The Second Account of Piety

-

Euthyphro responds by stating that what is dear to the gods is pious, what is
not, impious.
To be pious is to be dear to (some) gods.
Socrates agrees that this is the kind of answer he was looking for.
That is (in the case of piety), being dear to the gods might serve as a form
shared by all pious acts.
However, Euthyphro admits that the gods are in discord over what is dear to
them, so that the same act might be both pious and impious because dear to
some gods and not to others.
But this is absurd, given the previous concession that piety and impiety are
opposites: nothing can be both of one kind and its opposite kind.
The Third Account of Piety

Euthyphro chooses to hive up the claim that an act can be pious so long as it
dear to at least one god.
Socrates suggests a new description of piety as what it is dear to all the gods.
- To be pious is to be dear to all the gods.
But this condition, Socrates will argue, is only an affect or quality that is
shared by all pious acts.
The shared quality (being dear to all the gods)

Euthyphros Dilemma (Simplified Form)

-

Socrates begins his argument for the claim that being dear to the gods is not
the same as being pious by posing the questions as to whether:
-The pious is being loved by the gods because it
is pious or
-The pious is pious because it is being loved by
the gods.
This disjunction is assumed by Socrates to be exclusive: both cannot be true
at the same time.
If being loved bty the gods is the form off piety, then the pious is pious
because it is being loved by the gods.
Yet Socrates secures Euthyphros agreement that the pious is being loved by
the gods because it is pious.
This means that the 2nd alternative, which is Euthyphros thesis, s false.
Aporie
The emainder of the dialogue explores other attempts to give an account of
piety.
But as with the previous attempts, these prove to be unsuccessful.
The dialogue ends with Euthyphro leaving the scene, claiming that he is in a
hurry.
This unsatisfactory ending is an example of aporia or puzzlement.
Several other Socrates dialogues end in this unsatisfactory manner.
Socrates held in the Meno that aporia is useful when it shows someone (such
as Euthyphro) that he does not know what he thinks he does and thereby
motivates him to further investigation.
Must the Dear be Endearing
Euthyphro yielded to all of Socrates objections, but perhaps he did not have
to.
He might have rejected Socratess general principle that something is loved
only because of some feature it has that makes it loveable.
Thus, he could have held that pious acts are dear to the gods simply because
thay are inclined to love them.
Then the fact that the gods love the acts can explin why they are pious: that
is just what it means to be pious.
Socrates might object that the gods would then be guilty f acting arbritarily
by loving something without having a reason for loving it (or even that they
could no do so).
This kind of claim
Relativity
-Socrates might reiterate that surely there must be something about a dear
object that makes it endearing.
- People (and gods) aare endeared to things because those things have
fatures that they find appealing to them
And there is tremendous variation in what appeals to humans as well as
greek gods.

This relativity suggests that at least most things are not endearing as such, or
in themselves, but are endearing only to beings with a certain kind of makeup.
So, although being dear