Reply to Green

Political Theory

Volumn 33, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 273-279

  Tarnopolsky, Christina ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 34248036361     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591704273339     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Translations here and throughout are from Plato: Gorgias, trans. James Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). All citations refer to the Stephanus pages.
2. For a fuller elaboration of this point see Christina Tarnopolsky, “Plato on Shame in Democratic Athens,” Plato and the Politics of Shame (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services, ProQuest Company, 2002), 89–115.
3. Jeffrey Green, “The Shame of Being a Philosopher: Critical Response to Tarnopolsky,” Political Theory 33, no. 2 (2005): 268.
4. Green, “The Shame of Being a Philosopher,” 269.
5. Christina Tarnopolsky, “Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants: Plato and the Contemporary Politics of Shame,” Political Theory 32, no. 4 (2004): 485.
6. I follow Oona Eisenstadt in thinking that because of this kind of shame, Socrates might well have felt ashamed of not being able to educate more of his fellow Athenians during his lifetime so that they would have been able to recognize his elenctic activities as just and thus acquit him at his trial. For a fuller elaboration of this point, see Oona Eisenstadt, “Shame in the Apology,” Politics, Philosophy Writing: Plato's Art of Caring for Souls, ed. by Zdravko Planinc (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 40–59.
7. See also Raymond Guess's helpful distinction between the shamelessness of Diogenes and the shame of Socrates in Raymond Guess, Public Goods, Private Goods (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 30–31.
8. This translation is taken from “Plato's Apology of Socrates,” Four Texts on Socrates, trans. Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 80.
9. Green, “The Shame of Being a Philosopher,” 5, 6, 7. Though here I do not think that one can equate Plato's criticisms of Socrates with the content of Callicles' antiphilosophical diatribe.
10. Tarnopolsky, “Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants,” 487.
11. Green, “The Shame of Being a Philosopher,” 7. Though here I am assuming that this does not preclude the Platonic openness to being shamed by the nonphilosopher, which Green also wants to argue for, otherwise I do think that Platonic shame would revert to a Socratic model of the self-shaming of philosophy.
12. Tarnopolsky, “Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants,” 486–487.
13. I take this kind of acknowledgment to be an important aspect of the moral shame that Cheshire Calhoun speaks of in “An Apology for Moral Shame,” The Journal of Political Philosophy 12, no. 2 (June 2004). In the Republic, Plato argues that the first step toward making the many gentler toward philosophy requires acknowledging that they have inculcated a faulty notion of philosophy from the imposters and “drunken revelers” who have incorrectly imitated the philosophers (Republic, 499e-500b).
14. Tarnopolsky, “Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants,” 491, 486. The particular limitation of Socratic respectful shame, which this element of Platonic respectful shame is meant to address, relates to Socrates' unabashedness before others and is not the same thing as shamelessness.
15. For this distinction, see Christina Tarnopolsky, “Plato on Shame in Democratic Athens,” Plato and the Politics of Shame (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services, ProQuest Company, 2002), 113.
16. Tarnopolsky, “Prudes, Perverts and Tyrants,” 491.