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Knowledge and Temperance in Plato's Charmides
Author(s) -
Clark Justin C.
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
pacific philosophical quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.914
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1468-0114
pISSN - 0279-0750
DOI - 10.1111/papq.12218
Subject(s) - socrates , dialectic , interpretation (philosophy) , epistemology , soul , reflexivity , philosophy , reading (process) , value (mathematics) , sociology , computer science , linguistics , social science , machine learning
Toward the end of the Charmides , Socrates declares the search for temperance a ‘complete failure’ (175b2‐3). Despite this, commentators have suspected that the dialogue might contain an implicit answer about temperance. I propose a new interpretation: the dialogue implies that temperance is the knowledge of good and bad, when this knowledge is applied specifically to certain operations of the soul. This amounts to a kind of self‐knowledge; it also involves a kind of reflexivity, for it involves knowing about the value of one's knowledge. This positive reading, more than any other, makes sense of the dialogue's dramatic and dialectic features.

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