The first edition of the present volume, then called a "Companion," came out in 2013, with a third of the present editorial team (Nicholas Smith and John Bussanich). The present version differs significantly both paratextually and in its chapters but not in its basic program. The earlier version obscured the chapter authors, confined notes to a hard-to-use back of book, and printed the main text in double columns. The current version has abandoned these choices, though footnotes would be more useful for the intended audience. More significantly, only six of the earlier thirteen chapters get included in the second edition. Readers will thus need to keep and consult the first edition for chapters on the historical Socrates (Waterfield), irony (Vasiliou), philosophizing (Wolfsdorf), an earlier take on eudaimonism (Reshotko), an earlier take on moral psychology (Brickhouse and Smith), religious experiences (Bussanich), and an earlier take on the trial (Ralkowski).

As for programmatic similarities, both lack introductions and keep their prefaces to two or fewer paragraphs. The chapters themselves express, though do not explicitly justify, their shared purpose. The contributors discuss the English-language scholarly debates in philosophy journals and books, starting around 1970 and the work of Gregory Vlastos and his colleagues, students, and their peers - notably Nicholas Smith himself and his frequent collaborator Thomas Brickhouse - concerning the correct precisification of views taken to be expressed or maintained by the character Socrates in or across a certain canonical set of Platonic dialogues. This canonical set is what in recent decades have been "early" or "Socratic" dialogues, though sometimes reduced simply to Apology and Crito. (This volume does not defend or problematize this set; it uses it as a shared starting point.) Most if perhaps not all the scholarly debates narrated here will look familiar to any historian of philosophy. There are the questions about the "Socratic method," including the nature, power, intended effect, and actual effect of the so-called "elenchus" but also about some of Socrates' other argumentative procedures. Connected to these questions are those about definitions, one of the main targets of his "elenchus," in particular whether Socrates could believe that knowledge of individual cases of something, for instance courage, depends on knowledge of the universal. And does knowledge of a unified definition imply, in the Socratic context - though not in the Socratic vernacular - any "metaphysical" commitments, in particular to the "forms" mooted in various Platonic dialogues that amount to the immaterial causes of embodied qualities? There's also the nature of Socrates' disclaiming of knowledge of those definitions or of other significant life-guiding concepts or insights: how deep or broad might his claims to ignorance go? Many of those definitions concern what contributors to this volume call "the virtues" (in fact, usually, aretê or explicit or putative aspects or parts of aretê), and typically resolve, thanks to Socrates' interlocutors' proposals or acceptances, to their being seen as an instance of knowledge or even the same kind of knowledge each time. A vigorous set of exchanges in past decades concerned the way Socrates thought those "virtues" related to one another qua knowledge. Such issues have gained the topic-title "virtue intellectualism," and are now distinguished from those that fall under the topic-title "motivational intellectualism," the scholarly position that treats Socrates as holding that everyone aims for what they believe (i.e., are in a suitably intellectual/epistemic state toward) to be good. Closely related to both types of intellectualism is the thought that virtue and correctly-aimed desire conduces to eudaimonia, but how they do so, what eudaimonia is, and what gets sacrificed in working toward that instead of something else, has animated plenty of discussion. Views imputable to Socrates about a person's legal and political obligations; the rationality and object of love (or friendship); the belief-sensitivity of other emotions, including the fear of death; the theoretical and practical elements of religious participation; and the afterlife have also been frequently sought out and so there are chapters about them here.

All of these chapters - by Eric Brown, William J. Prior, Keith McPartland, Hugh H. Benson, Justice C. Clark, Paul Woodruff, Freya Möbus, Suzanne Obdrzalek, Irina Deretić, Curtis N. Johnson, Mark L. McPherran, and Emily A. Austin - do a fine job taxonomizing the positions found in the relevant literature over the past five decades. Besides the canonical figures mentioned above, and many of the contributors to the first and second editions, the major players in this literature includes Terry Penner, Richard Kraut, Daniel Devereux, and, to a lesser extent, Christopher Rowe and David Sedley. While each contributor provides a more or less developed personal take on the dialectic as developed in their respective chapters, this volume will seem, to many readers, most significant as a work of contemporary historiography.

Because the volume lacks an introduction, the value of such a work goes without defense. (Nobody even cites David Wolfsdorf's 2019 article, "Socrates, Vlastos, and Analytic Philosophy," which gives disciplinary explanation for this robust half-century interpretative movement.) Topics omitted go silently omitted, though one wonders whether not enough dialectical energy had been generated by the right people to warrant their inclusion. For instance, not only does "self-knowledge" not appear in the index, much less as a chapter topic, the term may not appear in the book itself. A distinctive or fine-grained Socratic understanding of philosophia is not treated at length ("philosophy" also does not appear in the index, though see 278, 291). There is no index entry on, or treatment of, "fallacies," deliberate or otherwise. There's no entry on "conversation." Naturally, handbooks call for selectivity, but clearer accounting for that selection seems appropriate for the reconstructed figure discussed.

Another important but silent assumption of the authors in the volume is that the character Socrates generally can and should be read as having views - relatively refined and detailed commitments to the sorts of things he talks about with his interlocutors - that plausibly carry across the dialogues in question. For instance, the following question - how can Socrates believe that piety is part of justice (Euthyphro) but also to be fully identified with justice (Protagoras)? - depends on thinking that he does believe one or both of these positions, and that he is not putting a plausible idea forward simply to generate some conversational result. Indeed, much of the enterprise of the Socratic scholarship of the past fifty-plus years has been to work out the views that these so-called shorter Platonic dialogues present, albeit with all their rhetorical flourishes. There may well be such views. But the authors of that scholarship often ignore the possibility that Socrates is presented as articulating some view for the sake of his interlocutors. Or, when they recognize the possibility, they discount it as infelicitous. For instance, against the idea that the "Laws of Athens" ventriloquized in the Crito present arguments that Socrates think would be specifically effective against his distraught friend, rather than his settled views, Emily Austin writes: "[since] the Laws do deliver the bulk of the dialogue, [...] attempts to excise them admittedly come at some textual cost". (333) By "excising" she means removing them from the corpus of Socratic views, as though we should strive to preserve as much of each dialogue as possible for educing them.

The book-ending chapters, Alessandro Stavru on Old Comedy, and Nicholas Smith on the trial of 399 BCE, stand out from the others in being about periods in the life of "the historical" Socrates. Both are sharp and learned and take an attractive stand. Rusty Jones and Ravi Sharma contribute a chapter on Xenophon - I had wished it would be an overview about Xenophon's Socrates overall; instead it is a forensic defense of the similarity of Xenophon's portrayal of Socrates' epistemic outlook to that of Plato's. I found Johnson's chapter on political philosophy refreshing in its insistence that most positions foisted by scholars on Plato's Socrates simply lack sufficient evidence. Paul Woodruff's chapter on happiness merges an eloquent introduction to the issues and a minutely analytic second half. The chapter on "religious" matters, by Mark McPherran, is one of the few to deal with Socrates' historical context. Austin's chapter on the Platonic Socrates' arguments and statements about death is nicely concrete. The two chapters on intellectualism helped me see that scholarly sub-field with newfound clarity. Unfortunately, nowhere in the volume is there an overview of the biographical lore or the varieties of late-classical and early-Hellenistic memorializing and interpretation of Socrates (the varieties that would go on to shape the way philosophers understand Socrates even now).

Some issues of production were annoying, such as highly inconsistent systems of reference in the inset quotations and an undeveloped index (entries often simply listing dozens of page numbers).

Christopher Moore