Ricerc@Sapienza

This paper aims at collecting and presenting relevant evidence about Hans Jonas’s interpretation of the Socratic philosophy. Against the background of a strong appreciation of Socrates’s research method – a positive evaluation widespread in many passages of works published by Jonas during his life as well as in some unpublished texts (but now available in the new Kritische Gesamtausgabe or published autonomously by other scholars after his death) – more specific attention will be devoted to a short, but highly significant paper: Socratic Virtue and Wisdom. After examinig the strict interconnection existing among some Socratic key-concepts (as for example: nature, good, goal, knowledge), Jonas here presents Socrates as the champion of a strong idea of theoria, intended as knowledge of the essence and based on a form of (inacceptable) dualism even more radical than the Platonic dualistic approach.