This is a refreshing and persuasive book. Crotty starts by taking Socrates’s disavowals of wisdom in the Apology seriously. Socrates’s ignorance motivates his virtuous search for wisdom through dialogue. Crotty argues that the irony in Socrates’s famous method is not that Socrates already knows the answers; rather ignorance motivates sincere, ongoing dialogue and is itself a source of moral action and wisdom. Crotty takes issue with a scholarly tradition (and with an impressive array of scholars—Gregory Vlastos, Paul Woodruff, Charles Kahn, Julius Moravcsik, among others) that focuses on the objects of knowledge—eternal, immutable Platonic forms. To grasp a form, Crotty suggests, would mean closure, whereas Socratic virtues emerge in process—engaging other thinkers while admitting ignorance and refraining from actions (e.g., politics) about which one can know almost nothing. A sticking point, if there is one, comes in Crotty’s fluid comparisons of dialogues from different periods of Plato’s presumed theoretical development. Crotty sees an ethical theory across the Phaedo, Meno, and Charmides, and a theory of the relation of perception to knowledge across Theaetetus, Phaedrus,and Republic, for example. But Crotty’s wholistic interpretation is lucid, erudite, and challenging. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.

Choice Reviews

Kevin Crotty offers a salutary correction to the current scholarly view of Socratic ignorance. Far from being a merely negative absence of knowledge, he argues, Socratic ignorance – awareness of one’s ignorance of the most important things – is dynamic, visionary, and endlessly productive of philosophical insight. And, he persuasively shows, this view of ignorance is not confined to the so-called Socratic dialogues, but characterizes Platonic thought from start to finish. Crotty gives insightful readings of key dialogues in clear, accessible, and engaging prose. The book is an important contribution to Platonic scholarship and, by implication, a brief for the contemporary renewal of an attitude of Socratic ignorance that is currently in short supply.

Thomas Tuozzo, University of Kansas

Beautifully written and insightful, Ignorance, Irony, and Knowledge in Plato offers compelling evidence to rethink readings of Plato as a dogmatic thinker. Challenging the simplistic, dichotomous model of knowledge and ignorance that generations of interpreters have attributed to Platonic thought, Kevin Crotty powerfully brings forth the vital role of ignorance in the endless philosophical quest for wisdom. Along the way, he demonstrates how even the most seemingly definitive of Plato’s dialogues create rich occasions for enhancing one’s awareness and appreciation of the perplexingly unfathomable depths of the world around us, others, and even ourselves.

Rebecca LeMoine, Florida Atlantic University

Ignorance, Irony, and Knowledge in Plato is an excellent book for philosophers and philosophically-minded readers alike. Crotty clarifies dimensions of Plato that for too long have been eclipsed by technical analyses fixated on syllogistic deconstruction. His explorations present Plato in the full majesty of his philosophical, literary, and artistic genius. The dialogues come to life in their dramatic splendor, wherein the constitution of virtue becomes a communal, cooperative process. The reductive commitment to philosophical knowledge as a static “cognitive mastery of essences” makes way for an organic, processual knowing whose flourishing depends continuously on the humble and morally edifying admission of ignorance.

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