The first words of Plato’s Euthyphro are ti neoteron—idiomatically, “What’s new?” but, more literally, “What’s newer?” Norman Fischer’s Tradition and Autonomy in Plato’s Euthyphro is organized around the penetrating insight that, for Plato, the answer to the idiomatic question is that to human beings nothing is ever really new and nothing is ever is really old—only newer and older. Accordingly, there are no absolute points of beginning from the past that altogether determine what we become; nor are our futures ever so open that we ourselves can make absolute beginnings. This is the character of our being in time. It shows up powerfully in the explicit theme of Plato’s Euthyphro—piety—which involves honoring the past (tradition) so as to forge a future (autonomy). Fischer follows this pair of opposites bound irrevocably together, and other pairs born of it, with great care and imagination and forges a subtle and bold argument for what it is that makes piety a virtue. This is a book worth reading.
