The Reputations of Socrates: The Afterlife of a Gadfly

The Reputations of Socrates examines the uses and misuses of the name of that Athenian philosopher through the centuries. James W. Hulse argues that the central ethical message of Socrates as expressed in the Apology and Crito was distorted by generations of admirers and detractors from the time of Plato through the Enlightenment. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the process generating the central ideas of the paradigmatic gadfly began, and the development has continued to our time.