Euthyphro

1. Euthyphro The search for a proper definition of Piety or Holiness

2. Preamble • Setting: Steps of the King Archon’s court. • Socrates being charged with impiety, and the dialogue is about the meaning of piety. • Euthyphro is there to charge his father with murder (which many think is impious). • Socratic irony: “I realize that as well as you do, my dear friend, and that’s why I am eager to become your student. I know that this Meletus … pretends not to notice you at all, whereas he has seen me so sharply and so easily that he has indicted me for impiety” (5c) • Vainglory: the conceit of wisdom.

3. Definition 1 • “What’s pious is precisely what I’m doing now: prosecuting those who commit an injustice, such as murder or temple robbery, or those who’ve done some other such wrong, regardless of whether they’re one’s father or one’s mother or anyone else whatever. Not prosecuting them, on the other hand, is what’s impious” (5d-e). • Evidence: The god’s treatment of their fathers. • Problem: It’s not a ‘real’ definition. (It’s an ostensive definition.) Socrates wants the delineation of a characteristic that can be used to pick out any instance of impiety, not just this one. (6d-e)

4. Definition 2 • “What’s loved by the god’s is pious, and what’s not loved by the god’s is impious” (7a). • Response: The god’s quarrel and differ with each other (7b). • Some disputes – e.g., those over empirical and mathematical properties – can be settled by the facts or concepts of the matter. • Other disputes – such as those about justice, goodness (i.e., value issues) can’t be so settled. • When the gods disagree about what can’t easily be settled, then the same thing is both pious and impious, and this definition fails (8a).

5. Definition 3 • What all the gods love is pious; what all the gods hate, is impious (9d) • The Euthyphro question • “Is the pious loved by the gods because it’s pious. Or is it pious because it’s loved (10a)? • I.e., what is the cause here, and what is the effect? Socrates answers by saying that the act of loving must precede (or cause) the state of being loved. “It’s not because it’s a loved thing [a state] that it’s loved by those who love it; rather it’s because it’s loved [an act] that it’s a loved thing” (10c).

6. Definition 3 cont’d • Euthyphro then attempts to say that an action is loved by the gods because it is pious, rather than the other way around. But his choice implies that the state of being loved precedes the act of loving, which contradicts the agreed upon premise that the act must precede the state. • Piety and what all the gods love are not the same. Essence vs. mere attribute or property • Presumably, there are other things loved by the gods besides piety – justice, for example– so being loved does not differentiate a concept like piety from a concept like justice. Both piety and justice share the property of being loved, but Socrates is searching for the thing that makes piety the thing that it is and nothing else. If other things besides piety are loved by the gods, then being loved can’t be the essential property of piety. 

7. Definition 3 cont’d • Euthyphro now stumped: “I have no way of telling you what I have in mind. For whatever proposals we put forward keep somehow moving around and they won’t stay put” (11b) • Aporia or befuddlement– Socrates’ interlocutors often say they have been stung by a stingray from their slumbers. • Aporia is the start of true philosophical exploration, according to Socrates, since you won’t look for that which you think you already know.

8. Prelude to Definition 4: genus-species def’s • Socrates suggests that piety is a part of justice: “the pious as a whole must be just” (11e). • Genus species definition. Isolate a large group (genus) to which something (a species) belongs (similarity) and then note as well how the species differs from the genus. E.g., Aristotle's definition of the species humans: The animal (genus) that thinks (differentia). S. discusses this @ 12 b-c. • What, then, is the differentia of piety (amongst the genus, just things)?

9. Definition 4 cont’d • Piety is “the part of the just .. that is concerned with tending to the gods…” (The other part of justice attends to humans) (12e). • Question: What do we mean by “tending to” the gods? In other cases, tending to x always benefits x (dog and horse trainers). But surely we don’t improve the gods by tending to them. • It is rather, Euthyphro says, like the tending of a slave to a master (13d). But what is the end of this? I.e., what do the gods get from our attendance?

10. Definition 5 • Piety is “some sort of knowledge of sacrificing and praying,” where “sacrificing is giving to the gods, and praying is asking from them” (14b). • Piety, then, is an “expertise in mutual trading between gods and men” (14e). • But while it’s clear that we benefit from the god’s, what benefits can we give them? • “Honor and reverence” i.e., “what’s pleasing to them” (15b). • But then we are back to the definition that piety is what is pleasing to the gods, which has already been defeated. • Aporia.