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A close text commentary showing the interplay of the philosophical issues, the characters and the dialectic across the dialogue.
List of contents
1. Introduction; 2. The prologue (153a1-159a10); 3. Charmides' first definition of sôphrosynê: Temperance is a kind of quietness (159b1-160d4); 4. Charmides' second definition: Temperance is a sense of shame (160d5-161b4); 5. Charmides abandons 'the best method'. The third definition: Temperance is 'doing one's own (161b4-162b11); 6. Enter Critias. The third definition revisited: Temperance is the doing or making of good things (162c1-164d3); 7. Critias' speech. Temperance is knowing oneself (164d4-165b4); 8. Socrates and Critias debate the technê analogy. From 'knowing oneself' to 'the knowledge of itself' (165b5-166e3); 9. Critias' final definition: Temperance is 'the science of itself and the other sciences' or 'the science of science' (166e4-167a8). The third offering to Zeus (167a9-c8); 10. Can there be an epistêmê of itself? The Argument from Relatives (167c8-169c2); 11. The Argument from Benefit (169c3-175a8); 12. The Epilogue; Appendix: Plato's Charmides. Translation. Alternative format; Bibliography.
About the author
Voula Tsouna is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her other books include: [Philodemus] [On Choices and Avoidances] (1995), a critical edition and commentary of one of the Herculaneum papyri on Epicurean ethics, which received the Theodor Mommsen Award; The Epistemology of the Cyrenaic School (Cambridge, 1998), recently translated into Modern Greek (2019); The Ethics of Philodemus (2007); and a collection of essays on the Socratics and the Hellenistic schools (2012). She is currently preparing a monograph on Republic Books 8 and 9 and another on The Normativity of Nature in Hellenistic Philosophy, to appear in the series Cambridge Elements in Ancient Philosophy, edited by James Warren.
