Trials of Reason

David Wolfsdorf received a doctorate in Classics from the University of Chicago in 1997. He currently teaches in the Philosophy Department at Temple University where he specializes in Ancient Greek philosophy.

Trails of Reason is a provocative and original book... its complexity is a testament to its author's admirable ambition.

• INTERPRETATION: ; Introduction; ; Interpreting Plato; ; The Political Culture of Plato's Early Dialogues; ; Dialogue; ; Character and History; ; The Mouthpiece Principle; ; Forms of Evidence ; DESIRE: ; Socrates as an Erotic Figure; ; The Subjectivist Conception of Desire; ; Instrumental and Irrational Desires; ; Desire in the Critique of Akrasia; ; Interpreting Lysis; ; The Deficiency Conception of Desire; ; Inathentic Friendship; ; The Three-Dimensional Conception of Desire; ; Anti-Philosophical Desires ; KNOWLEDGE: ; Excellence as Wisdom; ; The Epistemic Unity of Excellence; ; Dunamis and Techne; ; Goodness and Form; ; The Epistemological Priority of Definitional Knowledge; ; Ordinary Ethical Knowledge ; METHOD: ; The Socratic Fallacy; ; Socrates' Pursuit of Definitions; ; Hupothesis; Two Postulates; ; The Geometrical Illustration; ; Geometrical Analysis; ; The Method of Reassuring from a Postulate; ; Elenchus and Hupothesis; ; Knowledge and Aitia; ; F-conditions; ; Cognitive Security ; APORIA: ; Forms of Aporia; ; Dramatic Aporia; ; The Example of Charmides; ; Charmides as Autobiography; ; The Politics of Sophrosune; ; Critias' Philotimia; ; Self-Knowledge and the Knowledge of Knowledge; ; Knowledge of Knowledge and Knowledge of the Good Philosophy in the Polis ; APPENDICES: ; List of Commonly Used Greek Words; ; The Irony of Socrates ; BIBLIOGRAPHY