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On the source of Burnet's construal of Apology 30b 2–4: a correction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2012

M.F. Burnyeat
Affiliation:
All Souls College, Oxford

Abstract

The construal of Apology 30b 2–4 which in JHS 123 (2003) I attributed to John Burnet had appeared in print sixteen years before his edition of Euthyphro, Apology and Crito. I now suggest that it probably originated in the mind of J.A. Smith, who was an undergraduate contemporary of Burnet's at Balliol College, Oxford, and later Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy. The unexpected construal, transmitted by Balliol tradition, is typical of Smith's cast of mind.

Type
Shorter Contributions
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 2005

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References

1 Burnyeat, M.F., ‘Apology 30b 2–4: Socrates, money, and the grammar of γίγνεσθαι’, JHS 123 (2003) 125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Williamson, Harold, Plato's Apology of Socrates, edited with introduction and notes (London: Macmillan, 1908)Google Scholar; Burnet, John, Plato's Euthyphro, Apology of Socrates, and Crito, edited with notes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924).Google Scholar I owe deep thanks to Paul Kalligas for pointing me to Williamson's anticipation of Burnet's construal.

3 Kinch Hoekstra kindly took the time and trouble to search the Balliol records on my behalf and send me this and other information used below.

4 CR 31 (1917) 69–71.

5 For this last point he cites Goodwin, Syntax of Greek Moods and Tenses §§532, 534. The same construal is advocated, independently of Smith and on philosophical rather than grammatical grounds, by Rist, John M., ‘The theory and practice of Plato's Cratylus’, in Gerber, Douglas E. (ed.), Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Studies in Honor of Leonard Woodbury (Chico: Scholars Press, 1984) 207–18Google Scholar; repr. in Rist, John M., Man, Soul and Body. Essays in Ancient Thought from Plato to Dionysius (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996)Google Scholar ch.2. Rist has confirmed to me that he did not know of Smith's article.

6 ‘The practicability of Plato's ideally just city’, in Boudouris, K. (ed.), On Justice. Plato's and Aristotle's Conception of Justice in Relation to Modern and Contemporary Theories of Justice (Athens 1989) 95104Google Scholar at n.4; more easily available in Hopkins, Jim and Savile, Anthony (eds), Psychoanalysis, Mind and Art. Perspectives on Richard Wollheim (Oxford: Blackwell 1992) 175–87Google Scholar, or Fine, Gail (ed.), Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul (Oxford University Press 1999) 297308.Google Scholar

7 See, for example, Aristotle's Criticism of Plato and the Academy 1 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press 1944) 244.

8 CQ 14 (1920) 16–22.

9 In ‘De Anima II 5’, Phronesis 47 (2002) 28–90, I point to several examples, esp. at n.63.

10 DNB 1931–1940, 819–20.

11 Ironically, it was Ross's punctuation in his edition of 1924 that made Smith's conjecture feasible. For Ross put parentheses round τὰ γὰρ γένη … ζητεῖν, whereas previous editors had printed a high stop after τιθέασιν in line 27, which enforced the standard construal. Now all Smith had to do was close the parenthesis four words earlier, after μᾶλλον.

12 Both style and content are illustrated by his autobiographical contribution ‘Philosophy as the development of the notion and reality of self-consciousness’ in Muirhead, J.H., Contemporary British Philosophy (2nd series, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1925) 227–44.Google Scholar Readers of this journal may like to know that Smith's interest in Croce and Gentile was shared by his successor in the Waynflete Chair, the philosopher and ancient historian R.G. Collingwood, who graduated from University College, Oxford, in 1912. I conjecture that Collingwood attended Smith's lectures. At any rate, they became good friends: Collingwood, R.G., An Autobiography (Oxford University Press, pbk edn 1970) 18.Google Scholar

13 DNB 1922-30, 138.