Apologizing for Socrates: How Plato and Xenophon Created Our Socrates

“Exciting, scholarly and partly convincing….the book should be urgent reading for all serious students of Socrates.”

Apologizing for Socrates: How Plato and Xenophon Created our Socrates complements such existing approaches as the assumption that Socrates adapts his argumentative style to his interlocutor or the assumption that Plato’s thinking changed during his career…. Apologizing for Socrates is well worth reading for anyone interested in the historical Socrates or the authorial agendas of Plato and Xenophon.

Gabriel Danzig”s Apologizing for Socrates: How Plato and Xenophon Created Our Socrates provides an original and illuminating approach to the puzzle posed by the undeniable inconsistencies in the Platonic corpus as well as by the apparent logical lapses in the Socratic arguments presented in Plato”s dialogues. Judiciously consulting Xenophon”s portrait of Socrates and comparing it with Plato”s, Danzig suggests that both authors engaged in defending Socrates against the suspicions and deprecations of him by his contemporaries. Situating both Plato and Xenophon within their historical milieu, Danzig refreshingly charts a middle course between, on the one hand, judging Plato unduly harshly, and, on the other, going to extreme interpretive lengths to secure his reputation as a literary and philosophical genius. — Roslyn Weiss, Lehigh University