Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
The Development of Ethics: Volume 1From Socrates to the Reformation$
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.
The Development of Ethics: Volume 1: From Socrates to the Reformation

Terence Irwin

Print publication date: 2007

Print ISBN-13: 9780198242673

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198242673.001.0001

Show Summary Details
Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (oxford.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2021. All Rights Reserved. An individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use. date: 25 January 2021

The Cyrenaics

The Cyrenaics

Chapter:
(p.45) 3 The Cyrenaics
Source:
The Development of Ethics: Volume 1
Author(s):

TERENCE IRWIN

Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198242673.003.0003

In Plato's lifetime, Aristippus, a disciple of Socrates, defended at least some aspects of the hedonist position that came to be known as Cyrenaic. At the same time, Antisthenes defended the sufficiency of virtue for happiness, and understood this doctrine to exclude hedonism. His views were taken to extremes by Diogenes the Cynic. Later critics were surprised that moralists with such sharply opposed views could all claim to defend a Socratic position. Some have called the Cyrenaics and Cynics ‘the incomplete Socratics’, conveying the suggestion that they saw only one side of Socrates, and presumably that Plato and Aristotle saw both sides, and so reached a more accurate picture of him. This suggestion may not be quite fair to the one-sided Socratics. Socrates' views may have been indefinite enough to make each ‘incomplete’ construal of him a defensible way of tying up some loose ends that Socrates left.

Keywords:   Plato, Aristippus, Socrates, happiness, hedonism, Diogenes, Cyrenaics, Cynics, Aristotle

Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.

Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.

To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .