The philosopher's image in Plato's Euthydemus

Abstract

There is in the narrative contexto of Euthydemus the absence of a strict separation between philosophy anda eristic. The dialogue ends in a aporia that stages a misadventure of two friends, Socrates and Crito, before the inability to mark a border in that philosophy is crucial to the education of young people, at the expense of eristic. Despite constant insistence of Socrates, in his narrative, to delimit the need to exhort young people to the love of wisdom, a methodological confusion does not yet provide a separation between philosphy and eristic, in a way that they still appear to be the same activity. Accordingly, only through a behavioral distinction between sophist and philosopher is that the narrative can move toward this separation. Before that, the objective of this work is to show how the narrative of Socrates, in the Euthydemus, is an attempt to buid an image of the philosopher as different from the sophist, in order to mark the separation between philosophy and eristic.