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Socratic Thought-Experiments and the Unity of Virtue Paradox

The early dialogues of Plato contain no perfectly explicit and unequivocal affirmations on Socrates' part of the view (UV) that all of the human virtues (viz., courage, temperance, piety, justice, and wisdom) and, by implication, the whole of virtue are actually just one single thing with so many different names. But then again, Socrates makes virtually no explicit pronouncements in these works of any doctrines whatsoever (for reasons no doubt emanating from his philosophical method). So here is an area where argument ex silentio is especially impotent. On the other side, there is powerful circumstantial evidence that Socrates does indeed endorse UV, at least in the Protagoras. Twice in that work (at 329 C-D and 349 B-C) he presents it as one of a pair of competing ontological positions, the other (P V) being that each of the special virtues is a distinct part of virtue entire, from which his interlocutor, Protagoras, is asked to select. Now inasmuch as this pair is quite clearly presented by Socrates as exhausting the field of reasonable choice, it is a plausible inference that he regards the battery of arguments he eventually directs against P V (Protagoras' selection) in the dialogue' as providing some indirect support (though certainly not an ironclad proof) for UV. As with other so-called "Socratic Paradoxes",2 identifying UV as a piece of genuine Socratic doctrine carries with it an invitation to undertake two highly interdependent exegetical tasks. The first of these, which has been very well-attended in the literature, is to figure out precisely what UV comes to, i.e., to develop an interpretation of the relevant passages which