Socratic dunameis: A tapestry of many threads.

Abstract

In the early Platonic dialogues Socrates uses the concept of dunamis, which is commonly translated as 'capacity', 'power', 'ability', or 'potentiality', in connection with his search for true knowledge of morality. He ascribes it to inanimate, rational and non rational animate substances, intelligible entities and abstract ideas. No matter how often the philosopher uses the term, he does not develop a model for it. In this dissertation, then, I argue that the Socratic assumptions concerning dunamis rely for the most part on what the philosophic tradition before Socrates had established. Like his predecessors, the early natural philosophers, Socrates understands dunamis to be a property of animate and inanimate objects that merely signifies the capacity to change or cause change, but he fails to explain the nature of the interaction between dunamis, basically an immaterial entity, and a material animate or inanimate object. His focus merely on human dunameis shows that a dunamis is related to a particular activity of a specific object with a specific nature, it is manifested under specific circumstances, and difference in the object is a necessary and sufficient condition for difference in the dunamis .