What can sociology reveal about philosophy as a socially conditioned practice, and what can it tell us about the nature of philosophical claims to knowledge? In What is the Sociology of Philosophy?, Carl-Göran Heidegren and Henrik Lundberg introduce the sociology of philosophy as a research field. Against the background of a survey of the history of the field, as well as of some of its central concepts, Heidegren and Lundberg present three case studies, all of which focus on the philosophical development in post-war Scandinavia, mainly Sweden and Norway.

In this paper, I address the question of how to understand Socrates’ willingness to obey the law and accept the death penalty in the Crito, seemingly in contrast to his rebellious attitude towards legal authority in the Apology. My aim is to show that in submitting to the laws of Athens, Socrates does not betray his own ideal of self-government, in the sense of personal autonomy and freedom, which he explains and defends in several dialogues. However, I shall argue that Socrates conceives of self-government as the freedom to subject oneself to what used to be an external authority, but in such a way that this authority now becomes an integral part of one’s own moral stance. In order to throw further light on this issue, I also draw upon the discussion of the rule of law in the Statesman, where the notion of self-government similarly plays an important role. 

 In my comments on Vardoulakis’s paper, I try to challenge the overall thrust of Vardoulakis’s argument, that Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle’s ethics rests on a fundamental mistake, an inability to recognize the instrumentality, or the relation between means and ends, that is fundamental to the concept of phronēsis. Against Vardoulakis’s supposition that Heidegger for his own part is in search of a conception of action without ends, I suggest that a major aim of Heidegger’s early work is to clarify the teleological structure of human action, with particular focus on the end or telos of action. Vardoulakis seems to think that Heidegger’s later critique of instrumental reason is in place already in the early work, but this is a view that I cannot share. Moreover, I believe that Vardoulakis’s own interpretation of Aristotle’s theory of action is problematic, and in particular the way he conceives of the difference between the end of action and that of production: namely, as a distinction between an instrumental, although provisional end on the one hand, and a causal or final end on the other. I devote the greater part of my comments to a critique of this distinction, such as it is used by Vardoulakis, and also to developing an alternative interpretation of Aristotle’s conception of action in a broader sense, which I hope can also contribute to making Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s ethics seem more plausible than it does on Vardoulakis’s account.