>>8000167
Did you not read the dialogue? Doesn't he describe in there somewhere his belief that everything comes from having been not because it is? You aren't led because you are in a state of being led. You are led because you were once not being led now you are. He uses this meme to justify his belief in an afterlife. For you to become dead, you must live. For you to live you must have been dead or some state previous to being alive. In his words, not mine, he believes that because this theme is common in nature. That there must be a state between the two or before. Hot does not become Cold because it is Cold. It becomes Cold because it is cooled. And this is where some of his logic stems from, observations of nature.

Few things:

1) Euthyphro is an early dialogue and entirely concerned with refuting the eristic argumentation of the sophists (specifically, not clarifying their terms) This involves linguistic ambiguities, often things as simple as making false equivalence between homonyms that look or sounds like, but are nevertheless loaded with different meanings:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro#Third_definition
>To the modern reader, this part of the argument (10a-11a) sounds painfully convoluted. But it had to be written this way, because the Greek of Socrates's time lacked the grammatical terminology to refer to the active voice and passive voice which would have greatly simplified Socrates's expressions.[4] Nor can he refer to Aristotle's Categories, which also goes into great detail on this distinction (treating it as between simple expressions of state and secondary substances). So he explains with detailed examples ('carried', 'loved', 'seen') instead.

2) You're reading Jowett which can be tricky for exactly this reason even in the best of cases, even in dialogues other than the Euthyphro. But here it's fucking murder. He just translates the thing and assumes people will figure it out, I guess?

In general though, Jowett is not going to give you seventeen footnotes for every sentence, and often won't provide the Greek equivalent of phrases in brackets, which critical editions will usually do. Very helpful, e.g., when the English translation is horribly clunky and confusing but the original Greek makes intuitive sense, as in this case. You kind of need a good sense for when you should be imagining the Greek "behind" Jowett's translation of it, rather than just the English. Combined with the above point, this can make many of Plato's early dialogues especially challenging, because eristic argumentation naturally hinges on ambiguity of terms and linguistic issues specific to the Greek language.

You're unfortunately reading a particularly bad swamp of difficult translation in Plato, both in the usual sense and in cultural terms since they lacked concepts we now think of intuitively. On top of that, literary communication is secondary and oral is primary at this point - Plato is one of the first real prose writers in the Western tradition. So the ancient reader of this dialogue would pick up on Plato's point intuitively, that homonyms are not necessarily synonyms, where you're lost as fuck. Plato is trying to tackle things in whole paragraphs that we could say in two words because we have formalised grammar and writing.

>>8000167
Existence precedes essence

I think Plato is saying predicates do not cause action, but rather it's the other way around. (Effects cannot be their own causes.)

What makes the pious man pious? Because it is affirmed he is pious, or because his being pious allows us to then call him pious?

>>8000334
No

>>8000385
Sort of

>>8000312
Yes

>>8000167
Kek, this exact passage pissed off so many undergraduates when I took an ancient phil course, it's great

>>8000167
>>8000167 (OP)
To be fair, a lot of Euthyphro is Socrates' usual absurdity, but Euth refuses to play along and get into a senseless debate.

An important undertone of this is that Socrates is trying to bait the pious Euth into impiety, and to debate about the gods which is also impious.

So for instance in your quote, Socrates is setting Euth up for an argument that would lead to infinite regress, and potentially questions about the gods. Instead of taking the bait, when Socrates asks him if is doesn't agree, he just says yes.

Euthyphro is great because Socrates is clearly the antagonist. Euth approaches Socrates trying to help him out, and when Socrates tries to turn on him, he just isnt having any of it. He isnt as dumb as he seems at first glance.

>>8001403
...how on earth did you read it like this??

Socrates successfully shows that Euth has circular logic (NOT an infinite regress), and that as one poster said before, we cannot rightly say that the pious man is said to be pious because he was simply pious already, but we need to observe piety within him. Its an exploration into inductive reasoning, and Plato uses this type of reasoning later to demonstrate the existence of forms (specifically the Argument from Science).

>>8001435
I bet you think Socrates was innocent too.

Euthyphro's name means roughly "straight-shooter" for a reason. If you look at OP's quote, you'll see that it is Socrates who is making non-substantive claims. Where as Euth, the pious man refuses to speak on what can not be spoken of. The reason the argument goes in a circle is not Euth, but Socrates. He is trying to wrangle( a reference to eristic) Euth into a corner and capture him like Proteus so Socrates can finally get someone to tell him about the indefinable normative concepts he is so desperate to know anything about.

>tfw too stupid to comprehend large parts of Parmenides
M-Maybe I just have a shitty translation.
Feels bad, /lit/.

>>8002046
That dialogue is notoriously opaque