Reading Group on Plato’s Charmides

NOTE: This is the 1st of a series of posts and discussions of Plato’s dialogue Charmides. To view later posts, go to the main blog page and scroll down from there. Please feel free to add comments, questions, corrections, etc.

If anyone out there is interested, some friends and I will be gathering to discuss Plato’s dialogue Charmides beginning on June 5th. I will start posting notes, discussion questions and background information this week and next, mostly to get you thinking about the text. Feel free to contribute with questions or comments wherever you are and as you see fit. The dialogue is largely a search for the meaning of the reality behind the Greek word sophrosyne, variously translated as “moderation” or “temperance” or “sound-mindedness”. There is no exact English equivalent, which may actually help us since we will be less prone, as a Greek reader might, to presume that we already know what it is. A problem for the Anglophone reader is that the English translations sound dull, too prosaic to be of interest. But sophrosyne is a foundational virtue, enormously interesting and important, as I hope you will all come to recognize.

Here are a couple of ground rules:

For the Charmides, our provisional discussion schedule is:

Session 1 on June 5th — beginning to 162b
Session 2 on June 12th — 162c to 167a
Session 3 on June 19th — 167b to end

On translations: I have been using both the Grace & Thomas West translation and the Lamb translation in my Loeb Classics edition. Others will be using the Rosemary Kent Sprague translation. All translations have their strengths and defects, so really any translation will do. Here is a link to the online Jowett translation. It is free, which is nice, but lacks the Stephanus numbers we will be using to call out passages. Another online option that does have the Stephanus pagination can be found at the Perseus website. Its defect is that you have to click from page to page. Its virtue is that you can quickly toggle to the Greek if you want to look at it.

I will start posting notes, discussion questions and background information this week and next, mostly to get you thinking about the phenomenal reality behind the Greek word sophrosyne, variously translated as “moderation” or “temperance” or “sound-mindedness”. There is no exact English equivalent, which may actually help us since we will be less prone, as a Greek reader might, to presume that we already know what it is. Our problem as anglophones is that the English translations sound dull, too prosaic to be of interest. But sophrosyne is a foundational virtue, enormously interesting and important, as I hope you will come to recognize.

One final thing. If you are in the Augusta, Georgia area and would like to attend in person, we will be meeting at the Denny’s on Washington Road near the I-20 interchange. We are meeting on the dates indicated at 6:30 am. (Yep — A.M.!)