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Socratic Midwifery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Julius Tomin
Julius Tomin
Affiliation:
Oxford
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Extract

In Plato's Theaetetus Socrates is portrayed as a midwife of the intellect. The comparison of Socratic questioning to midwifery had until recently been commonly attributed to Socrates himself. In 1977 M. F. Burnyeat published Socratic Midwifery, Platonic Inspiration, which transformed the way in which the dialogue has since been perceived. The author maintains that the midwife comparison is in no sense to be attributed to the historical Socrates.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , May 1987 , pp. 97 - 102
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1987

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References

1 Robinson, R., Plato's Earlier Dialectic(Oxford, 1953), pp. 83–4.Google Scholar

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7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books(1958), p. 20. Quoted from Burnyeat,‘Examples in Epistemology’, op. cit. n. 4, 383.Google Scholar

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11 Burnyeat, M.F.,‘Socratic Midwifery’, loc. cit.; n. 3, p. 14Google Scholar

12 In quoting from the TheaetetusI follow McDowell's translation in the Clarendon Plato Series.

13 Plato, Meno80a—c.

14 Burnyeat, M.F.,‘Socratic Midwifery’, op. cit., 14 n. 4.Google Scholar

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20 Tr. according to H. M. Hubbell's tr. of Cicero, De Inventione51, 52, and G. C. Field's tr.of the fr. in Plato and his Contemporaries(1930), p. 151; cf. schol. of Victorinus ad. Cic. loc.

21 H. Diels, ‘Ueber das dritte Buch der Aristotelischen Rhetorik’, Abh. der Bert. Akad.(1886), 22.

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* I would like to express my gratitude to Bridget Hadaway for raising the English of my article to a level adequate to the subject discussed.