The Socratic Turn
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The Socratic Turn addresses the question of whether we can acquire genuine knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong. Reputedly, Socrates was the first philosopher to make the attempt. But Socrates was a materialistic natural scientist in his youth, and it was only much later in life—after he had rejected materialistic natural science—that he finally turned, around the age of forty, to the examination of ordinary moral and political opinions, or to moral-political philosophy so understood. Through a consideration of Plato's account of Socrates' intellectual development, and with a view to relevant works of the pre-Socratics, Xenophon, Aristotle, Hesiod, Homer, and Aristophanes, Dustin Sebell reproduces the course of thought that carried Socrates from materialistic natural science to moral-political philosophy. By doing so, he seeks to recover an all but forgotten approach to the question of justice, one still worthy of being called scientific.
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The Socratic Turn
Knowledge of Good and Evil in an Age of Science
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Had the young Socrates come to a stop before the prescientific awareness of things, he would have been compelled to recognize that the bigger human being and the food are or are genuine wholes (cf. Aristotle Metaphysics 1020b6–8, 1022a33–35). And that recognition would have compelled him to concede, in turn, that nothing remains or persists unchanged in the course of human growth. At the same time that the food, in perishing, perishes into the bigger human being, the bigger human being, in coming to be, comes to be out of the food. The very being from which, according to this account, the bigger human being comes to be, therefore perishes or ceases to be altogether. However, if something of the first being out of which the subsequent being comes to be does not somehow remain or persist unchanged within that (subsequent being) which has come to be, then the latter could perhaps have come to be out of nothing. That which is, the food, in perishing, could have perished without qualification (into nothing), and that which is not yet, the bigger human being, in coming to be, could have come to be without qualification (out of nothing).
In an effort to avoid making a concession that would ultimately threaten science or its basic premise or requirement, the young Socrates refused to come to a stop before the prescientific awareness of things. He reduced both the food and the bigger human being to their materials or elements, “flesh” and “bone” and the other body parts, instead (96c9–d1, 98c6–7). And in so doing he refused to recognize what “everyone” is otherwise aware of: that the human being and the food are or are genuine wholes.14 By reducing in this way all the beings subject to the change in question to their common materials or elements, the young Socrates was able to preclude anything from coming to be or perishing without qualification. Insofar as the materials or elements at least neither come into being nor perish without qualification, they may thereby serve, since they are fixed themselves, to set fixed limits on the quality and the degree of the changes to which the perishable beings are subject.
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