Book Club: Early Socratic Dialogues, 7, Hippias Minor — or why virtue is knowledge and no one does evil on purpose

[Socrates]

The Hippias Minor (named after the Sophist Hippias of Elis) is one of two Platonic dialogues featuring Socrates being his usual sarcastic self at the expense of the title character. We looked recently at the Hippias Major, on what it means to say that something is “fine,” and it is now time to tackle the next to the last chapter in the exquisite edition of the Early Socratic Dialogues curated by Trevor J. Saunders. The Hippias Minor is about two of the most fundamental ideas of Socratic philosophy, and arguably of the entire Greco-Roman tradition: that virtue is a kind of knowledge, and that nobody does evil on purpose. These are known as Socratic paradoxes, from the original Greek meaning of the term, “uncommon opinion.”

According to Socrates, virtue is a skill, and can, consequently, be taught. He uses the famous “craft analogy” here: moral learning is akin to learning a craft like carpentry or swordsmithing, and it is therefore possible to find people able to teach it, however rare they may be in practice (and Socrates, of course, never claims to be one of those people). More generally, virtue is a type of knowledge, but of a special kind, since it cannot be used for ill purposes (by definition), unlike knowledge from crafts (one can be a swordsmith…