Notes Toward No One Wiser

Last Updated: 2022-11-06

• The entire Platonic corpus (sans Laws and Epinomis) is an apologia for Socrates.
• How well did Socrates know himself? Consider his mischieveous behavior at the trial, and his continued association with Alkibiades. What were his “derailers”?
• Consider the dialogues in the light of Aristotle's Poetics... Ch 1: The Socratic dialogues are a mimesis of thought, character, and action. (But all the action in his life happens offstage: his work as a stone mason, his valor in battle, his service on the Council during the trial of the generals, his marriage to Xanthippe, etc.); Ch 2: As with tragedy, do the dialogues portray Socrates as better than he was? Perhaps so, if they comprise an extended apologia. (Compare Plato to Xenophon and fragments of other dialogue writers.) There also seem to be comic elements in the portrayal of others, especially Sophists like Hippias and Gorgias but also reputedly wise leaders like Laches and Nikias; Ch 4: Plato’s Socratic dialogues are an imitation of nobler actions and the actions of good men, since they praise the character of Socrates; Ch 6: Tragedy involves the “imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude”; action implies personal qualities of thought and character; thought involves the proof of something (as in rhetoric, not logic) or the enunciation of a truth; Ch 7: Imitation of an action that is “complete, whole, and of a certain magnitutde”; does this imply that serious and whole are equivalent? A story is whole if it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. As to magnitude, longer is better. (How long in clock time are each of the dialogues?); Ch 8: The unity or wholeness of action: the plot must imitate not everything that, say, Odysseus (or Socrates) did, but a single action that reveals a structural unity of the parts, such as the nostos of Odysseus; Ch 9: Tragedy inspires wonder, and also pity and fear; the latter are true at least of the last dialogues. What about “philosophy begins in wonder”?; Ch 10: Does Socrates experience a reversal or recognition of his fate?; Ch 11: Reversal and recognition hinge on surprise. Another key element is a scene of suffering (as in the Phaedo - but even here it is his friends who suffer, not Socrates himself); Ch 13: Is Socrates brought down by some error or frailty? If so, what? His “derailers” were mischievousness and perhaps arrogance and intemperance (with regard to Alkibiades); Ch 15: Character is revealed by the “moral purpose” inherent in speech and action. The character portrayed must also be fitting, true to life, and consistent; Ch 17: Presenting everything with the utmost vividness so that the spectator or reader can visualize the scene. Need to identify the plot of the dialogues (similar to Aristotle’s summary of the Odyssey); Ch 18: Do Aristotle’s concepts of Complication and Unravelling apply to the dialogues? Does a turn from good to bad fortune occur at the end of the Meno?; Ch 19: Investigate the rhetorical aspects of the dialogues; Ch 23: Consider which events are plot and which are episodes; Ch 26: Think about the unity of the dialogues based on Aristotle’s analysis of epic vs. tragedy.
• Parmenides: the retelling occurs after the death of Socrates, forming a kind of circle; the presence of auditors from Clazomenae is significant because that was the hometown of Anaxagoras, who was tried for impiety and fled from Athens around the same time as the dramatic date of the dialogue (450 BCE); note Antiphon’s annoyance at being requested to recite the dialogue; Pythodorus means a gift from Pythian Apollo and thus is connected to the oracular tradition; Parmenides counsels Socrates to become versed in the art of idle talking (eristic or dialectic); if there is a realm of abstract essences, then the gods know it but not the human world (impiety!); yet without such a realm, we could not philosophize about stable ideas; the simile of Ibycus and the racehorse; Parmenides chooses the youngest, least experienced interlocutor; the resulting conversation is a training in eristic for Socrates.
• Protagoras: eros for Alcibiades and for wisdom figures significantly in the preamble; the runaway slave Satyrus (what meaning?); Protagoras as courageous madman; the shame of being a Sophist; the education of a gentleman and freeman; the care of the soul; the importance of understanding; what is at stake is well being; knowledge is the food of the soul, but only a physician of the soul knows which knowledge is truly beneficial, and a Sophist may deceive in this matter; the irony of going to talk with Protagoras, Hippias, and Prodicus after the warning about Sophists; Homeric descriptions of the three Sophists; Socrates as Odyssean (cf Segvic); Protagoras teaches prudence (phronesis?) in private and public affairs; the political virtues are justice and piety (and temperance and wisdom); mention of a play by Pherecrates; quote from Homer (?); Socrates uses the method of Parmenides; esteem vs praise, gratification vs pleasure; check Homer and Hesiod quotes; praise of Spartan philosophy on the eve of the Peloponnesian War; “know thyself” and “nothing too much”;

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