Audiobook · read by volunteers
Euthyphro
Plato
Read by Andrew Miller, David Miller · 1 chapter · 40 min
About the book
Socrates is on his way to court, where he will answer a charge of impiety, when he meets Euthyphro at the porch of the king archon. Euthyphro is prosecuting his own father, and he is quite sure that he knows exactly what piety is. Socrates, who professes to know nothing, asks him to explain. One definition follows another, and each, under Socrates’s gentle questioning, comes apart in his hands. What is it that makes an action holy: that the gods love it, or that it is good in itself? Plato’s short dialogue is a model of how philosophy begins, with a simple question and a refusal to accept easy answers. The scene is Athens, shortly before the trial that will end Socrates’s life. Two voices share this forty-minute reading in Benjamin Jowett’s classic translation.
Introduction
Plato lived from 428 to 347 BC. A student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, he wrote a series of dialogues that remain among the most important works of Western philosophy. Euthyphro is one of the earlier and shorter ones, and it is one of Plato’s well-known Socratic dialogues.
The setting is simple. Awaiting his trial on charges of impiety and heresy, Socrates encounters Euthyphro, a self-proclaimed authority on matters of piety and the will of the gods. Socrates, desiring instruction in these matters, converses with Euthyphro, but as usual, the man who professes to know nothing fares better than the man who claims to be an expert. The conversation never reaches a final definition, and that is the point: the dialogue teaches by showing how an argument is tested.
The question at its centre, whether something is good because the gods approve of it or whether the gods approve of it because it is good, has been debated for more than two thousand years and remains alive in discussions of religion and ethics.
This recording uses the English translation by Benjamin Jowett, a classic of Victorian scholarship, and is made up of a single section lasting about forty minutes. Two LibriVox volunteers share the parts of Socrates and Euthyphro, so the exchanges sound like the conversation they are. It is short enough to be heard in a single sitting and makes an excellent first step into Plato. Even listeners with no background in philosophy will find that the questions Socrates asks are simple to follow and hard to answer.
Public domain
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text