Four Socratic Dialogues of Plato

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The Eutbypbra, which comes first in order, exhibits Socrates to us as a teacher, who seeks by his dialectical an to awake men out of their confidence in their own untested Opinions, and to stimulate them to inquire what they mean by their confident judgements on all ethical subjects. The search for a definition of piety leads to an exposure of the unsoundness of the basis of ethics provided by Polytheism, and it is discovered that thatalone can be regarded as a pious act with which all the gods are pleased. This, again, raises the question, whether an act is pious because the gods are pleased with it, or the gods are pleased with it because it is pious. If the latter, then piety must be defined as a part of justice or righteousness: but justice or righteousness is generally regarded as concerned only with our duties to men. We are therefore involved in a critical discussion of the question, whether the service of God imposes special duties, distinct from those involved in the service of man. The dialogue ends with the apparently negative conclusion that, if we exclude the absurd idea that men can help the gods, piety can only consist in doing what is pleasing to them - the very definition which has al ready been rejected as unsatisfactory. But the attentive reader will recognize that the discussion has brought us to a point of view from which piety is seen to be not a special department of morality, but only the religious aspect of it.