Socrates,taken as the figure in Plato’s so-called early dialogues,famously professes to be ignorant,but the nature and the scope of his ignorance have long been intensely debated and still remain obscure.In this pape...Socrates,taken as the figure in Plato’s so-called early dialogues,famously professes to be ignorant,but the nature and the scope of his ignorance have long been intensely debated and still remain obscure.In this paper,I try to contribute to the relevant discussions by pointing out and interpreting a generally overlooked,yet essential feature of Socrates’avowals of knowledge:in most cases,what Socrates claims to know falls under the category of(what I call)negative,as opposed to positive,ethical knowledge.The distinction between positive ethical knowledge and negative ethical knowledge is as follows:the former involves either definitions of what the good and virtues are,or knowledge that certain particular facts are good and virtuous;the latter refers to the knowledge of what the good and virtues are not,or the knowledge that certain particular facts are bad and evil.It will be argued that Socrates only avows negative ethical knowledge because he recognizes an asymmetry between the knowledge of the good and that of the bad:one may know a fact about the bad without knowing the corresponding fact about the good,but not vice versa.This epistemic asymmetry shows that knowledge of the good is more epistemically demanding than that of the bad,and thus it sheds further light on the scope of Socrates’ignorance and his view of the good and virtue.展开更多
文摘Socrates,taken as the figure in Plato’s so-called early dialogues,famously professes to be ignorant,but the nature and the scope of his ignorance have long been intensely debated and still remain obscure.In this paper,I try to contribute to the relevant discussions by pointing out and interpreting a generally overlooked,yet essential feature of Socrates’avowals of knowledge:in most cases,what Socrates claims to know falls under the category of(what I call)negative,as opposed to positive,ethical knowledge.The distinction between positive ethical knowledge and negative ethical knowledge is as follows:the former involves either definitions of what the good and virtues are,or knowledge that certain particular facts are good and virtuous;the latter refers to the knowledge of what the good and virtues are not,or the knowledge that certain particular facts are bad and evil.It will be argued that Socrates only avows negative ethical knowledge because he recognizes an asymmetry between the knowledge of the good and that of the bad:one may know a fact about the bad without knowing the corresponding fact about the good,but not vice versa.This epistemic asymmetry shows that knowledge of the good is more epistemically demanding than that of the bad,and thus it sheds further light on the scope of Socrates’ignorance and his view of the good and virtue.
