國立臺灣大學哲學論評

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“Ignorance” is generally considered a simplified form of expressing Socrates’ philosophy. Rousseau, once cited this expression in his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, has explicitly portrayed it as the core idea of Socrates’ view of virtue. The main argument of this paper will proceed to prove that passages of Apology cited by Rousseau are not made intentionally to further develop his own ideas. Instead, they do manifest an essential part of Socrates’ view of virtue. Having proved so, we nonetheless aware also that Socrates and Rousseau remain to be different concerning their views of virtue. They both hold “ignorance” being crucial in ethical significance; yet differ in its reference. Hence, we endeavor to distinguish their views on the basis of the label “understanding ignorance to be virtuous”. In the order of this article, we will proceed to see first of all Rousseau’s citation of Socrates’ words. Then, we move to a documentary analysis concerning the divergent opinions about this citation. After that, we illustrate Socrates’ view of virtue by distinguishing Socrates’ own thought from that of Plato in the persona of Socrates. With this distinction, we then approach to an examination of “the unity of virtue is knowledge” and “the understanding of ignorance”. With a similar structure of analysis, we finally come to the exposition of Rousseau’s view of virtue. We will vindicate that in Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, Rousseau successfully extended Socrates’ ideas from “admitting ignorance” to that “nature makes all people virtuous”. With this success, this article, while making explicit the divergence of their views of virtue, demonstrates a “spiritual correspondence” between Socrates and Rousseau.