Socratic Philosophy for Beginners? On Introducing Philosophy with Plato’s Lysis

Teaching Philosophy Online First: DOI: 10.5840/teachphil201462019

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Socratic Philosophy for Beginners? On Introducing Philosophy with Plato’s Lysis

BENJAMIN A. RIDERUniversity of Central Arkansas

Abstract: In recent years, Plato’s Lysis has received much attention from professional scholars, but could it be used as a text in introductory classes? It is true that the Lysis poses challenges as an introductory text—its arguments are fast-paced and abstract. But I argue that the Lysis is actually an excel-lent pedagogical text, well suited to engage novices and introduce them to philosophy’s distinctive methods and way of thinking. It works particularly well as a text for engaging students in active learning, insofar as it opens up a space for improvisation and exploration, providing tools for the readers and inviting them to take an active role in constructing their own understandings.

Plato’s Lysis is an intriguing dialogue—philosophically rich and sug-gestive, yet often frustratingly abstract and inconclusive. Much good work has been done in recent years to explore the philosophical content of the dialogue, analyze its arguments, and situate it among Plato’s broader theories and development.1 For such a short piece, the dialogue gives rise to surprisingly sophisticated debates. But it is worth noting that its participants, other than Socrates, are all very young—Lysis and Menexenus, Socrates’s main discussion partners, are only about 13, while the other participating characters, Hippothales and Ctesip-pus, are not much older. Socrates himself describes his efforts as “a demonstration of how to have a conversation” with a promising youth with whom one wants to build a relationship (206c). This raises the question: Could we, in turn, use the dialogue today as an introduction for philosophical novices? My claim is that, whatever else it might be, the Lysis is an excellent dialogue to engage novices in active philosophi-cal thinking and introduce them to philosophy’s distinctive methods and way of thinking.2 Indeed, the very features of the dialogue which seem to create barriers for understanding—its abstract and confusing arguments, its lack of a clear resolution—actually enhance its potential to foster genuine philosophical engagement, if it is used correctly.

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Challenges with Using the Lysis as an Introductory Text

I first read the Lysis in graduate school, and I enjoyed it so much that I incorporated it as a centerpiece of my dissertation. Until a couple of years ago, however, I did not consider using it with Intro-level students, for several reasons. For one thing, it lacks the dramatic flair of Plato’s more famous works, such as the Apology, Symposium, Gorgias, or Republic. It has no memorable metaphors or myths, no exciting scenes where Socrates takes down a sophist or a member of the Athenian elite. But my main concern, initially, was with its style of argumentation. Philosophical novices (and even more advanced stu-dents, for that matter) often have trouble following philosophical texts that lack concrete examples or scenarios they can use to make sense of abstract philosophical questions. But, remarkably, considering its topic, the Lysis’s arguments are unusually abstract and schematic. For example, consider this important passage, where Socrates develops the idea that friendship is explained by need or deficiency:

“So what is neither good nor bad is friend of the good on account of what is bad and an enemy, for the sake of what is good and friend.”

“It appears so.”

“So the friend is friend of its friend for the sake of a friend, on account of its enemy.”3 (219a–b)

What is this “neither good nor bad”? What are the “enemy” and the “friend for the sake of a friend”? It is a challenge (even for scholars) to puzzle through this passage. However, in my experience, after some discussion of examples, students do eventually understand and appre-ciate the basic point of Socrates’s proposal—that, in the presence of something bad (disease, ignorance), a person “befriends” what can help him to remove the bad (a doctor, a teacher) for the sake of some further good (health, wisdom).4 Nevertheless, students unused to philosophical writing often find this sort of abstract argument—especially with the repeated words, arranged in subtly different ways—both frustrating and difficult to follow. At the least, Socrates should have thrown in a few more examples to illustrate the point.

The pacing of the dialogue presents another obstacle. Especially in the second half, when Socrates explores the accounts of friendship, he goes through his arguments very quickly, taking little time to develop one idea before refuting it and moving on to the next. The result is a concise but baffling read. (One student commented, “It was like a crazy person talking to himself!”)5 In fact, the internal evidence of the dialogue seems to confirm that many of Socrates’s important points go right over the heads of his audience—by the end, none of his young interlocutors seems to have followed his main conclusions!6

SOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY FOR BEGINNERS?

It is worth mentioning another challenge a teacher would face in using the Lysis—the dialogue’s casual presentation of the traditional Greek practice of pederasty, in which a teenage boy and an older man exchanged sexual favors for mentorship and introduction into adult society. All of Plato’s discussions of love and friendship (including the more well known Symposium and Phaedrus) assume this type of relationship, but the idea often seems foreign and repugnant to modern readers. There is some risk that students, when confronted with such ideas, will shut down and refuse to engage.

We professors today often worry about the short attention spans and limited reading skills of our students, and as a result the trend has been toward shorter, simpler reading assignments, preferably expressed in modern, colloquial language with lots of vivid examples and, if pos-sible, explanatory boxes, pictures, and charts. We want our students to come to class interested and prepared, not confused and frustrated (or having given up altogether). The Lysis may seem to fall on the wrong side of that divide. Thus, although Plato’s works regularly appear on the syllabi of introductory philosophy classes, the Lysis is not often selected. In some cases, professors are simply not aware of it. But it seems likely that, among those who are familiar with the dialogue, some hesitation arises from the worry that students without advanced reading skills will not be able to follow the details of the philosophical argumentation well enough to benefit from the experience.

The Importance of Active Learning

If a professor is including some of Plato’s dialogues into her curriculum in order to present well-known doctrines of Plato’s philosophy or set the stage for debates in the history of ideas, the Lysis may not be the best choice. Nevertheless, as I will argue, the Lysis provides an ideal tool for drawing the students into a deeper and more lasting kind of learning experience.

Traditional teaching often centers on the lecture, in which an ex-pert in some field organizes and presents content to an audience of students, who, ideally, record and memorize the teacher’s insights. Recent literature on teaching and learning, however, has questioned the effectiveness of this kind of teaching and emphasized the need for active learning to facilitate deep and lasting learning experiences. In a recent book on the topic, Marianne Weimer describes the different kinds of learning as follows:7

When students concentrated on memorizing facts, focused on discrete ele-ments of the reading, failed to differentiate between evidence and informa-tion, were unreflective, and saw the task as an external imposition, . . . [they manifested] surface learning. When students focused on what the author

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meant, related new information to what they already knew and had experi-enced, worked to organize and structure the content, and saw the reading as an important step in learning, [their approach was] deep. (11)

In order to experience deep learning, students cannot be simply be told, in a lecture, what the text means, what a philosopher argued, or what lessons they should take away from the class. They must engage with the text actively on their own, struggling to make sense of it and to in-tegrate its insights into their own experiences and preexisting models of the world. In his book, Teaching with Your Mouth Shut, Donald Finkel describes how the right texts, along with carefully designed activities, can engage students in this kind of active learning.8 He compares a good text to a parable: The best texts, like a good parable, create a tension in the reader—the reader wants to solve them and to answer their puzzles, but they persistently resist easy solutions (15). They force the reader to dig deeper, disclosing new levels of meaning and new puzzles as the reader works through them. The teacher may have to guide or prompt the students to see a text in this way, but ultimately it is the text and the student who do most of the work. The Lysis has this quality—it refuses to make things easy for its readers. It forces them to read carefully, to reread and review, and to come up with their own examples and illustrations to understand and evaluate Socrates’s arguments. At the same time, it is short enough to read twice! It de-mands active engagement by readers, as they practice philosophical thinking. The rewards for students who are willing and able to do the work can be substantial.

Why the Lysis is Good for Introducing Philosophy

The first and most obvious reason that the Lysis, in particular, is a promising introductory text is its topic: Friendship, or, more specifi-cally, “how one person becomes the friend [philos] of another” (212a).9 Indeed, Socrates chooses this topic precisely because of its fitness for Lysis and Menexenus (ibid.). From my experience, friendship is a good topic for introducing philosophy to beginners for at least three reasons.

First, almost everyone—including youths like Lysis and Menex-enus—has significant personal experience with friendship. We have all had close friends and casual ones, some friendships that lasted, others that did not. When Socrates claims to be amazed that Lysis and Menexenus have found true friendship at such a young age (212a), he is probably being ironic—there does not seem to be anything special about these boys’ relationship.10 Indeed, the dialogue provides mul-tiple possible illustrations of friendships at various levels of maturity: Ctesippus and Hippothales; Ctesippus and his nephew Menexenus; Hippothales and Lysis; the boys playing games at the wrestling school;


Lysis and his parents; and, eventually, Socrates and the younger boys (223b). By depicting these relationships in the dialogue, Plato provides further material for thinking about the topic.11

In addition, unlike many other topics philosophers discuss, it is comparatively easy to grasp the importance of friendship. There is no need to motivate this issue for students—they already understand its place in a good life. They remember concrete experiences of spending time with friends, collaborating with them, and receiving their help in times of trouble, and so when Socrates asks for an explanation, they want to know the answer. Indeed, the value of the best kinds of friend-ships, in helping us to gain self-awareness and cultivate our souls, is closely connected to the value of the philosophy itself.12

Nevertheless, despite its ubiquity and importance, the task of under-standing friendship turns out to create a wealth of interesting puzzles, as the dialogue illustrates. Why do people become friends, anyway? Why do some friendships grow deeper over time while others fade away? How do we explain a parent’s love for a child? (210a–d). Like the Greeks, we have some platitudes and conventional formulae about friendship (“birds of a feather flock together,” “opposites attract”) but, as Socrates shows, these prove to be, under analysis, overly simplistic (214a–216b). When Socrates develops more sophisticated accounts, however, these also fall prey to puzzles and objections (216e–222d). It is the ideal classroom situation: Beginning from common sense ideas and shared human experiences, Socrates generates a series of interest-ing and challenging philosophical puzzles for his young interlocutors to ponder. Students see and participate in philosophy in action, while appreciating why it is worth doing.

What about the pederastic dimension of Greek friendships? Will stu-dents turn off or dismiss the dialogue because of its emphasis on these relationships? Some students will always be put off when encountering ideas contrary to their own worldview. However, seeing and discussing how differently ancient Greeks thought about “normal” sexuality can be a powerful way to induce students to reconsider the objectivity of their own idea of normalcy. Besides, one of Plato’s broader purposes in the Lysis (as in the other dialogues on love, Symposium and Phaedrus) is to call his own culture’s assumptions and practices into question, including pederasty. Can a quid pro quo exchange (as these often are) be a true friendship? What is required to build a true educative friendship between mentor and student? The practices differ, but these questions still arise for us today.

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Teaching Philosophical Method

Socrates’s goal in the Lysis is not only to stimulate Lysis and Menex-enus’s interest in philosophy, but also to draw them into an active philo-sophical inquiry and, ultimately, to initiate an ongoing philosophical friendship. In the process, moreover, he also demonstrates philosophical method—that is, how a philosophical investigation works. Throughout the discussion, Socrates repeatedly calls attention to the way that the investigation is being conducted.13 The Lysis therefore can serve as a useful way today to introduce beginners to some basic elements of philosophical method. In what follows, I focus on the second half, but similar things can be said about the first half.

In the second half of the dialogue, Socrates converses with both boys about friendship. He begins by asking Menexenus an apparently innocent question: “Which of the two becomes the friend [philos] of the other, the one who loves the beloved or the one who is the beloved of the lover? Or is there no difference?” (212a8–b2). Menexenus answers confidently that he does not think it makes a difference. But Socrates proceeds to demonstrate that even this apparently simple question is not as easily answered as it first appears and that problems arise however it is answered (212c–213c). Menexenus is stumped: “By Zeus, . . . Socrates, I myself am completely at a loss” (213c7–9). The discussion does not go anywhere, and Socrates happily abandons it for the more substantive investigation that follows.

Scholars disagree about the significance of this exchange—is it merely semantics, or is there some genuine problem here?—but, from a pedagogical standpoint, I see at least two important lessons. First, it puts on the table some questions that a complete account of philia would need eventually to address.14 Do we need to distinguish between mutual friendships and love for an object that cannot or does not love the lover back? On the other hand, the questions posed here—who becomes philos to whom?—do not seem to be central to the topic, as Lysis seems to recognize (213d), which brings me to the second function of the passage: It emphasizes the need for a clear sense of question you are asking and of the proper order for the investigation.15 Otherwise, as the impasse at 212c–213c illustrates, you get bogged down in minor points and fail to address the more important questions.

By the time the substantive inquiry begins at 213e, both boys’ inter-est and attention have been engaged. Socrates proceeds to give a fas-cinating demonstration of how a philosophical investigation proceeds. First, you need some ideas with which to begin. Usually, Socrates asks interlocutors provide the initial proposals, but he does not expect that from Lysis and Menexenus. (I suspect he does not want to demoralize them. Socratic cross-examinations are harsh, and it is disheartening when it is your idea that is refuted. Socrates has gentler methods for


getting the boys into the right frame of mind.16) Instead, he finds his first two accounts of friendship in the “ancestral voices of human wisdom,” in particular, Homer and Hesiod—well-known expressions of the conventional ideas about friendship (214a).

Socrates here exemplifies a familiar strategy for addressing philo-sophical questions, especially in a class. First, we consider: What have wise people of the past said? Aristotle explicitly used this approach, and indeed, most philosophy courses today are built on this model. We assign readings from Plato, Descartes, Nietzsche, etc., we guide students through the theories and arguments, and then we critically evaluate them. Ideally, we want students to develop their own ideas, building on their critical engagement with primary sources.

Once he has proposals to consider, Socrates next demonstrates how to put those ideas to the test. His refutations in the Lysis illustrate a wide variety of methods: In some cases, he shows that proposed ac-counts have unacceptable consequences (e.g., if the like were neces-sarily friend to the like, the wicked would be friends, but obviously they cannot be [214b–c]). In other cases, he argues that the proposal in question is insufficiently explanatory (likeness cannot explain friend-ship, because insofar as two relata are alike, they cannot benefit each other [214e–5a]). Socrates’s arguments are concisely constructed and executed, so much so that it is sometimes a challenge to work out the arguments. Nevertheless, they provide a nice illustration of how proposed philosophical accounts are assessed.

Significantly, however, Socrates not only refutes proposals; he also demonstrates how to learn from the failures of previous attempts to develop progressively better answers. Socrates’s own accounts, begin-ning at 217a, build on the lessons learned from the failed attempts to derive answers from the poets. In other words, Socrates shows that, when an account fails, it isn’t a wasted experience. Each failure informs the next step of the investigation. It seems to me that this is a crucial lesson for students to take away from a philosophy course. Much of what we study consists of refuted theories and failed arguments. Thus, it is important to recognize that, even in failure, we can learn something that can help us to make progress.

In the end, none of the accounts that Socrates and his young inter-locutors discuss proves successful. But the process provides a wealth of material for further investigation: First, it provides a suite of ideas and arguments that one might draw on in building and defending one’s own ideas about friendship. The students can take up the framework and models provided by the Lysis and use them to make sense of their own experiences. For example, a student might pick out one of the proposals and choose to explicate and defend it as the correct ac-count. I have frequently been impressed to see my students taking this

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step—providing further support for a favored account, responding to Socrates’s objections—often without much prompting from me. (Once I noticed this, I began more explicitly to encourage this response, as I describe in the next section.)

In addition to the main ideas Socrates develops and criticizes, the dialogue also contains some unexplored pathways that suggest other approaches for understanding friendship. Some ideas are dismissed quickly, without sufficient argument. I am personally interested in the possibility, which Socrates mentions very briefly, that neither good nor bad is friend to neither good nor bad (216e). It is not a complete account, of course—it lacks sufficient explanation of the phenomenon—but I think this is where human friendship must lie. As Socrates uses the terms, most humans are neither good nor bad. We are neither divinely self-sufficient, nor wholly corrupted by wickedness. We therefore need each other to live good lives and remedy our lacks and weaknesses. Socrates, however, dismisses this possibility abruptly, for clearly specious reasons.

Socrates makes other assumptions which shape the progress of the conversation, but which one might also question. For example, Socrates seems to assume, from the start, that he is investigating some one phenomenon, for which he hopes to discover a single, unified account. He is apparently seeking to account not only for human friendship, but also attraction and desire more generally. There is good reason, however, to think that such a comprehensive account may be impos-sible. Even if we consider only human friendship, Aristotle may have been right about the need to distinguish different kinds of friendship (Nicomachean Ethics viii.1 1155b12–16).

Assignments for Active Learning

As I teach the Lysis, therefore, I seek to lead the students through an encounter with the dialogue, using both the text and increasingly more complex assignments to incite them to progressively deeper levels of active learning.17 The first assignment is an informal writing assignment that I assign as homework while they are first reading the dialogue:

During his conversation with Lysis and Menexenus, Socrates pro-poses several accounts of friendship. Which one do you find the most plausible? Explain your answer, using your own experiences with friends in formulating your response.18

This assignment initiates active reading in the students’ first encoun-ter with the text—they read specifically with a view to evaluating Socrates’s proposals and criticisms as they come, keeping their own experiences in mind as they do so. In addition, the informal nature of the homework (I grade it mostly on completion) encourages the students


to associate freely in their answers. As a result, each student comes up with a unique set of ideas and examples, providing ample material they can draw on for the subsequent discussions.

With homework responses in hand, students arrive at our first class meeting on the Lysis, which begins with a small group assignment. Each group is assigned sections from the text to analyze, which they will present to the class. They are given the following instructions:

In your groups, discuss the following theories from the Lysis [each group has two or three of Socrates’s proposals], and say what each theory has going for it, and what its weaknesses are. What are Socrates’s criticisms, in the text? Try to think of as many pros and cons as you can—draw on not just what Socrates talks about in the dialogue, but also your own ideas and experiences.

This discussion creates the next, deeper level of active learning, as students engage in dialogue with both the text and each other. Dur-ing this activity (which takes about twenty-five minutes), I circulate among the groups and offer some guidance, pointing out key passages and asking some leading questions. For the most part, however, the students are grappling with the ideas and text with little input from me.

In the second class meeting on the Lysis, after each group has had a chance to present its findings, we open up a general discussion: What is friendship? How might we build an explanation of it? Many students pick out and defend one of the theories in the text. Some theorize (as did Aristotle), that there is more than one kind of friendship, perhaps corresponding to the accounts in the dialogue—we discuss and evaluate this approach. During a recent discussion, one student proposed that the ideas in the text could be read as stages in the development of a friend-ship. Others suggest that something like friendship cannot be defined, and we discuss that possibility and its implications for understanding Plato’s dialogues. Could that be why Plato ended the dialogue without a final conclusion? An important lesson I seek to convey through this discussion is that, in developing philosophical accounts, one must recognize the costs and benefits of different approaches. Suppose you feel that friendship requires a unified, comprehensive account. Then your challenge is to develop an account that adequately explains all manifestations of friendship. But maybe you don’t think such an ac-count is possible. Why not? How, then, do various types of friendship relate to each other? What makes them species of the same general human phenomenon?

Finally (often after reading other texts on friendship19) I assign a formal essay:

What is friendship? Write a 1200–1500 word essay on this topic. In your essay, first explain what you take to be the best theories and ideas from the texts [including Plato’s Lysis]. What do you like

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about these accounts? What are their weaknesses? Then, describe and defend your own theory. Relate your theory to the ideas from the readings, as well as ideas we discussed in class. Anticipate and respond to possible objections to your theory. In addition, use ex-amples from your own life and experiences to support your theory and show why it is right.

At this point, ideally, students reach a still deeper level of active learn-ing. They are engaged not just in reading a philosophical dialogue, but in practicing philosophical inquiry themselves.

Conclusion: Philosophy as Playful Improvisation

The features of the Lysis that I have been describing may seem, to many students, to be reasons for questioning the dialogue’s usefulness as a pedagogical text. It lacks firm conclusions that they can latch on to and make sense of—at the end, they wonder, what was the point of all of that? Have we gotten anywhere? Or was it all just pointless and frustrating wrangling about something everyone understands very well? I hope I have shown, however, that the very features that seem like problems can, in the right context and with the right presenta-tion, become strengths. Unlike some other classical philosophy texts (but like many of Plato’s works), the Lysis does not seek to answer all of its questions. Rather, it opens up a space for improvisation and exploration, providing tools for the readers and inviting them to take an active role in constructing their own understandings. This is how I teach the Lysis. We read the text and then consider the various propos-als and their strengths and weaknesses. Then, I encourage the students, through in-class activities and essay assignments, to develop their own ideas, taking into account what has been said.

In the Phaedo, as he is waiting for his death, Socrates tells his friends,

We should not become misologues, as people become misanthropes. There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse. (89d)

When they first encounter philosophy, many students are balanced between the love of wisdom (philosophy) and misology (hating what they see as pointless and possibly even harmful arguments and dispu-tation). They have the potential to engage in a thoughtful and positive examination of their own lives and beliefs, but they are wary, and, depending on how it is taught, a philosophy course can easily push them one way or the other. If it dwells on the repeated failure of philosophy—the false or incomplete theories; the quick refutations of classical arguments; the fact that for every idea, there is a criticism—they will begin to see philosophy as a pointless waste of time, if not


something that threatens to destabilize all of their certainty and truth. (Of course, philosophy does and should destabilize assumptions, but it is not pointless!) That is why I seek to emphasize the positive aspect of philosophy as playful exploration and discovery. The Lysis is a good dialogue for that approach.

Notes

1. Recent book length studies include T. Penner and C. Rowe, Plato’s Lysis (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and M. Nichols, Socrates on Friendship and Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

2. My article thus approaches the Lysis from a different angle than the recent Teach-ing Philosophy article by Jeremiah Conway (“Friendship and Philosophy: Teaching Plato’s Lysis,” Teaching Philosophy 34:4 [2011]). Conway writes about using the Lysis in an upper-level philosophy course specifically on the topic of friendship, with mostly philosophy majors, whereas I am proposing the dialogue as an introduction for novices.

3. Plato, Lysis, trans. Stanley Lombardo, in Plato on Love, ed. C. D. C. Reeve (In-dianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006).

4. See Lysis 217a–b, 218a–c.

5. At one point, Socrates himself exclaims, “I’m getting downright dizzy with the perplexities of the argument” (216c).

6. For example, near the end of the dialogue, when Socrates says, “Then the genuine and not the pretend lover must be loved by his boy,” Lysis and Menexenus are reluctant to answer and “just managed a nod of assent,” while Hippothales beams with pleasure (221e–222b). Apparently the younger boys are worried that by assenting to this conclu-sion, they are agreeing that they must love smarmy flatterers like Hippothales; certainly this is how Hippothales takes it. But if they had understood the argument, they would have suspected that this was not a conclusion they needed to be reluctant about, since it wouldn’t be lovers like Hippothales whom they would have to love back. Then, when Socrates asks them whether “the good belongs to everyone” or “the bad belongs to the bad, to the good the good, and to the neither good nor bad the neither good nor bad,” they make the wrong choice and pick the latter (222c). But Socrates had just gotten done telling them that what belongs (to oikeion) has to be different from what is alike (to homoion) (222b–c).

7. M. Wiemer, Learner-Centered Teaching (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002).

8. D. L. Finkel, Teaching with Your Mouth Shut (Portsmouth, N.H.: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., 2000).

9. Of course, the Greek terms “philos” and “philia” have a broader range of mean-ing than their English equivalents. In some places in the dialogue, it becomes clear that Socrates is interested in developing an account not just of human friendship or bonding, but of desire or attraction more generally (for example, at 219a–b, cited above).

10. There are several different levels of irony at play in this passage (as I think there usually are when Socrates says things like this). First, there is the irony of Socrates’s claim that he has no true friends, while Lysis and Menexenus do. Surely Socrates has many friends—Crito, Chaerephon, all of those who attend his trial and join him on his

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last day in the Phaedo! But perhaps none of these people count as true friends, for which there are more stringent requirements. But, in that case, it seems unlikely that Lysis and Menexenus would already be friends of this sort. So the irony here—like the irony in, say, the Euthyphro—is double: On one level, Socrates is ironic when he says he has no friends. But on another level, he is being ironic when he says that Lysis and Menexenus already are true friends.

11. According to Conway, the Lysis implicitly introduces the idea, found in Aristotle’s later discussion of friendship, that there are multiple types of friendship: “I want to suggest that the dialogue’s structure has already disclosed multiple understandings of friendship. With a little digging, it is not hard to find an anticipation of Aristotle’s later taxonomy of friendship” (Conway, “Friendship and Philosophy,” 413). I disagree with this reading. First, there are clearly more than three kinds of philia at issue in the dialogue; one finds three types corresponding to Aristotle’s division only if one is already anachronistically looking for that result. All the same, Socrates is clearly seeking a single account that can explain the common element of all of these types. Perhaps that is a misguided goal, but it is clearly what Socrates wants.

12. Conway makes this point nicely in his article. Ibid., 416–20.

13. See 213d, 215c,217a.

14. Notice, however, that the puzzle is easier to grasp with the Greek terms “philia” and “philos” than English “friendship” and “friend,” insofar as the Greek terms have a broader range of meaning. In Greek, one can be “philoinos” or “philogumnastai,” but it would sound strange in English to use “friend” that way. You can be a “wine-lover” or an “exercise-freak,” but not a “friend of wine” or “friend of exercise.” You can be a “friend of animals,” but that seems to be because we think animals love you back. (Indeed, I think that’s the message groups that use that term want to convey.) Uses of “friend” that do not entail mutuality are unusual. Aristotle, on the other hand, must specify what kind of “philia” he is talking about, and his account still includes kinds of relationships (e.g., between parents and children) that we probably wouldn’t call “friendship” (Nicomachean Ethics 8.1–2, 1155b8–16, 1155b28–1156a5).

15. Plato often emphasizes the importance of conducting an investigation in the right order. See, for example, Meno 71a–b; Republic I.354a–c. According to my reading of this passage, Socrates initiates this exchange with Menexenus because Lysis wants him to “pun-ish” his “eristic” friend (211b–c). Socrates knows when he starts that, however Menexenus answers, he will be refuted. At the same time, Socrates knows that the questions he is asking cannot be answered substantively without first addressing the more fundamental questions about philia. Therefore, he is pleased when Lysis picks up on this fact: Lysis is seeing that a real philosophical investigation must be carried out the right way.

16. I discuss Socrates’s efforts to engage Lysis in the philosophical discussion in my article, “A Socratic Seduction: Philosophical Protreptic in Plato’s Lysis” (Apeiron 44.1, 2011).

17. The class sequence described here focuses on just the second half of the Lysis. I sometimes use a longer sequence (taking about four class meetings) that covers the whole dialogue. The first half also contains many interesting questions that students enjoy, about, for example, a parent’s love for his or her child.

18. In addition, the teacher may or may not want to provide students help in locating the main accounts in the text (e.g., as a handout to go with the homework). By my count, Socrates considers five main accounts of friendship:


i. Friends are alike (214a): In other words, similarities (shared experiences, personalities, interests, etc.) explain friendship.

ii. The good are friends (215a–b): People become and remain friends because they appreciate and respect each other’s character. (Aristotle identified this as the basis of “complete” friendship.)

iii. The opposite is its opposite’s best friend (215c–e). As we might say today, opposites attract.

iv. What is neither good nor bad is friend of the good because of the pres-ence of bad (216e–218c). That is, a friend supplies a good we need because of something that is bad or deficient.

v. Friends naturally close to or akin to each other in some quality of their souls (221d–e).

19. In the past, I have used selections from Aristotle’s treatment of friendship in Nicomachean Ethics Books 8 and 9 to provide a contrasting approach to the problem. After reading the Lysis, one can see that Aristotle developed many of his own ideas in response to Plato’s arguments. Those who are interested in delving more deeply into the topic of friendship should consider Michael Pakaluk’s anthology Other Selves: Philoso-phers on Friendship (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1991), which collects selections from throughout the history of philosophy.

Benjamin A. Rider has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin and is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Central Arkansas. His research focuses on Plato’s philosophy of education, particularly his thoughts on the problem of how to engage someone in active philosophical thinking—a problem of particular relevance to teachers of philosophy today. [email protected]

Socratic Philosophy for Beginners? On Introducing Philosophy with Plato’s Lysis

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