The Phaedrus depicts the Platonic Socrates’ most
explicit exhortation to ‘philosophy’. The dialogue
thereby reveals something of his idea of its nature.
Unfortunately, what it reveals has been obscured
by two habits in the scholarship: (i) to ignore the
remarks Socrates makes about ‘philosophy’
that do not arise in the ‘Palinode’; and (ii) to treat
many of those remarks as parodies of Isocrates’
competing definition of the term. I remove these
obscurities by addressing all fourteen remarks
about ‘philosophy’ and by showing that for none
do we have reason to attribute to them Isocratean
meaning. We thereby learn that ‘philosophy’
does not refer essentially to contemplation of the
forms but to conversation concerned with selfimprovement
and the pursuit of truth.
