Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Socrates

Available since mid-2019, Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Socrates, comprising 1030 pages, contains 36 articles providing a nearly unbroken 2350 years of philosophical / para-philosophical reception of Socrates, a paradigm of moral discipline and cognitive perspicacity, revealing a figure of practically unparalleled influence — of an amazing varied sort — on the history of Western intellectual history. (I contribute the article on Aristotle, whose attitude toward the history of philosophia becomes remarkably clearer with minute study of his appreciation of Socrates.) Among many other fascinating lessons, we learn that the contemporary treatment of Socrates as the promulgator of an ethical intellectualism and its concomitant paradoxes — that is, as a philosopher with views or methodological pretenses on a par with the Sophists or early Academics — has little parallel in most of the generations of Socratic appreciation.

Chapters address the uptake of Socrates by authors in the Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Late Antique (including Latin Christian, Syriac, and Arabic), Medieval (including Byzantine), Renaissance, Early Modern, Late Modern, and Twentieth-Century periods.

The book has recently been reviewed by Lloyd Gerson in Classical Review.