July 8 - 12

Tutors: James Carey and Frank Pagano

Hippias of Elis, a well-known sophist, is Socrates’s interlocutor in two dialogues named after him. The central theme of the Hippias Major is beauty. The central theme of the Hippias Minor is falsehood. A suggestion is advanced in the latter that intentional falsehood might be better than unintentional falsehood. This suggestion is connected to Socrates’s general claim that virtue is knowledge and. vice is ignorance. That Hippias is Socrates’s sole interlocutor in a dialogue treating beauty—or nobility, as they are the same word in Greek—and his chief interlocutor in a dialogue treating falsehood raises the questions of how beauty is related to intentional distortion of truth and whether truth, considered in itself, is closer to ugliness than it is to beauty.

Text: The Roots of Classical Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues (ed. Thomas Pangle). Cornell University Press, ISBN 978-0801494659