Socrates as Orthonym: The Heteronymic Configuration of Western Philosophy's Founding Corpus

Socrates as Orthonym proposes that three historically distinct philosophers can also be read as functional positions in one transmitted project.

The positions are:

• Socrates — orthonym: the founding operative gesture, constituted by the vow to logos and the refusal to write.
• Plato — survival-heteronym: the position that makes the founding gesture transmissible after Socrates’s death.
• Aristotle — systematizing-heteronym: the position that converts the inheritance into organized, teachable disciplinary form.

The model does not erase doctrinal disagreement. It asks whether contradiction may perform preservation by forcing the project to rearticulate itself across changing historical and generic conditions.

The paper divides the Socratic problem into historical, literary, and doctrinal forms. Its strongest intervention concerns the doctrinal form: instead of sorting propositions into the “real Socrates” and “real Plato,” the reader asks which functional position a proposition occupies.

Three confidence levels are declared:

• high confidence: the configuration can be modeled functionally;
• medium confidence: the Socratic problem becomes a symptom under this model;
• heuristic: modern heteronymic systems make the reading thinkable but do not prove it.

Version 1.2 adds a quantitative-comparative argument about corpus size. The paper compares the combined classical corpus with large single-author lifetimes and argues that volume alone does not require a multi-project interpretation. This is the author’s comparative argument, not settled classical-philological consensus.