After the return to the defense, Simmias and Cebes raise objections to Socrates’ kinship argument, Socrates warns them to avoid misology, and then he responds to Simmias’ objection. These objections and this warning simultaneously serve as the climax of the first half of the dialogue and set the agenda for the second. I argue that misology is a more specific problem than it is typically taken to be, a problem that aspiring philosophers (like Socrates’ companions) are especially at risk of suffering, one that involves not merely becoming cynical about arguments but positively hating them. I then turn to Simmias’ objection and Socrates’ response to it. I argue that, as Socrates interprets Simmias’ theory that the soul is a harmonia, it makes the soul a properly fitted together composite, not the formal structure possessed by such a composite. This means that Socrates is not arguing against a type of supervenience theory or epiphenomenalism, as is frequently claimed. Socrates’ arguments against Simmias’ theory highlight how it cannot explain basic ethical features of the soul that the kinship argument’s account can explain.

Chapter 3 explains the methods of scribes for ruling manuscripts of English literature in the fifteenth century, from a variety of works but especially those of Thomas Hoccleve. It notes that scribes imposed geometric designs onto materials hylomorphically. It then contrasts their failures to achieve regular design. It suggests that ruling patterns seldom had a practical function to articulate the text by means of page design, but that ruling was sometimes a craft process pursued almost habitually by scribes, and at other times was an inherited convention with a force of its own. It concludes that ruling on the material pages was less important to scribes than the immaterial ideas that governed page design. Ruling was ultimately jettisoned.