ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a reading of Plato’s programmatic curriculum in the Republic and the education of the philosopher rulers as understood in terms of a “doctrinal” reading of Plato, i.e., the view that Socrates advocates a teachable method that is directed toward the acquisition and possession of propositional knowledge of the virtues. The analysis moves to consider an alternative interpretation of the dialectic and hence Socratic education ( paideusis ) in Books VI and VII of the Republic as inspired by a “non-doctrinal” reading of Plato’s Republic . The interpretation reveals that the practice of the dialectic neither culminates in sure and certain knowledge of the Good or the Forms of the virtues nor reaches a terminal point where it is no longer dependent on the hypothetical method as introduced by Plato’s Socrates in both the image of the Divided Line and the Allegory of the Cave . I conclude by moving away from a “literalist” view of Socratic education and set the stage for the introduction and understanding of what I develop throughout the book as a radical form of Socratic paideusis, which is intimately linked with the elenchus-dialectic and the difficult and painful practice of care for the soul , which is the practice of examining the virtues that is set within an ontological context highlighted by finite human transcendence and bounded by the intractable limits imposed by the horizons of finitude.
