He leaves his fate in the hands of the jury and God. It was a close vote to convict, out of Meletus is demanding death. He plays with the jury regarding his punishment--he should be rewarded for his actions with free maintenance by the state. He gently chastises that his trial has been allowed only one day.
He has no money for a fine and says he would be just as irritating to those in another country to which he might be exiled, since he cannot change his ways. If I say that this would be disobedience to God, and that is why I cannot 'mind my own business', you will not believe that I am serious. If on the other hand I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others is really the very best thing that a man can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living, you will be even less inclined to believe me.
Nevertheless that is how it is, gentlemen, as I maintain, though it is not easy to convince you of it. He is defiant. His execution will damage the reputation of Athens. It will shorten his life only slightly. He is condemned not because of a lack of an adequate defense but because of his lack of impudence and refusal to grovel.
He is resolved to uphold the law and not attempt to escape death, which would be wrong. Those who voted against him are depraved and wicked, and will be punished. His execution will not stop the criticism that has previously been suppressed. He admonishes them to make themselves as good as they can be. He speaks warmly to those who voted to acquit. He welcomes death, and notes that his execution was not divinely opposed.
He reflects on death, which is either an annihilation or a change, a transmigration of souls and removal to Hades. Socrates explores the meaning of temperance or self-control sophrosyne with a handsome youth. It is an ideal embodied in the Delphic inscriptions "Know thyself" and "Never too much.
The morning of his execution, Crito tries unsuccessfully to persuade Socrates to escape, but Socrates wants "not to live but to live well. A wrong can never be justified; a citizen must uphold the law. Socrates explores piety or holiness with a lawyer prosecuting his own father, prior to Socrates' own trial. Socrates argues with the famous rhetorician and Sophist Gorgias and his pupil Polus that rhetoric, though possibly giving power and persuasion, produces belief without knowledge.
Socrates maintains that it is worse to do wrong than to suffer it. Callicles asserts a philosophy of might is right, saying that philosophy is suitable only for youth, and that the better and wiser man should rule and have more. They that can succeed indulge their appetites, whil others are forced to praise moderation and temperance.
But Socrates argues that some pleasures are not good and that pleasure and good are not the same. After the judgement at the crossroads, the man "who has led a godly and righteous life departs after death to the Isles of the Blessed and there lives in all happiness exempt from ill, but the godless and unrighteous man departs to a prison of vengeance and punishment which they call Tartarus.
And you may let anyone despise you as a fool and do you outrage, if he wishes, yes, and you may cheerfully let him strike you with that humiliating blow, for you will suffer no harm thereby This is the best way of life-- to live and die in the pursuit of righteousness and all other virtues. Socrates discusses art techne with the Homeric rhapsodist Ion. Unlike the knowledge acquired in other arts, Socrates asserts that the poetic art is not an art at all but a divine gift like magnetism.
Poets are possessed by the gods like bacchants and "it is the god himself who speaks, and through them becomes articulate to us. The Lesser Hippias is an inferior dialogue in which Socrates argues with Hippias the Sophist about voluntary vs involuntary wrongdoing. Greater Hippias is on the beautiful. The authenticity of both has been questioned. Again ask what virtue is and if it can be taught. Discusses immortality of the soul and its multiple rebirths and demonstrates that we have knowledge that can be recalled by questioning a slave boy about triangles etc.
Virtue is not learned but is a divine dispensation, and its possessors are to others as Tiresias was to the flitting shades of the underworld. Anytus warns Socrates against slander. Phaedo recounts to Echecrates the last hours of Socrates sometime after his death, a day to which he was a witness along with Apollodorus, Menexenus, etc.
The execution had been delayed awaiting the return of the ship which was sent to Delos on an annual religious mission. Phaedo recalls how happy Socrates seemed, how cheerfully he looked forward to death.
Xanthippe appears and is hysterical, and Socrates sends her away Plato seems quite unsympathetic to her. Socrates notes the similarity of pleasure and pain, and that they are often experienced together--he suggests that they are like two bodies attached to the same head, as in some imagined Aesop fable.
He recalls a recurring dream he has had, in which he is exhorted: "Socrates, practice and cultivate the arts.
He argues against suicide to Cebes, saying we are put in a sort of guard post and that the gods are our keepers and we their possessions, and we will be punished if we destroy ourselves.
The senses are inaccurate. The soul finds truth, not with the senses, but through pure thought and reflection divorced from the senses. The intellect can contemplate absolute truths such as "absolute uprightness. We must separate ourselves from these urges to attain pure knowledge. Pure knowledge may only come from the purification of death. Philosophers make their occupation the freeing and separation of soul from body. The courage and self-control non-philosophers display are based merely on fear of losing pleasures.
Wisdom must be the ultimate goal of life--it makes possible true courage, self-control, and integrity. Socrates looks forward to being dead, as his soul will be able to mix with past rulers and great thinkers. But Cebes is skeptical about the afterlife and the persistence of the soul--he wonders if the soul does not merely disperse at death and no longer exists.
Socrates considers the question whether souls transmigrate, and recounts the legend that they do in fact return from the dead. He provides an elaborate argument about opposites begetting opposites, that death and life are opposites, and that death must therefore beget life rebirth or palligenesia--this argument seems to be based on a fallacious assumption! He believes souls return from the world of the dead and that "what we recollect now we must have learned at some time before," and that "learning is recollection" or recovery of knowledge formerly known but temporarily forgotten after birth.
This recollection or anamnesis occurs when questions are asked in just the right way. For example, we have a built-in knowledge of absolute equality. Cebes remains unconvinced, arguing that we may indeed recall previously forgotten knowledge, but that does not prove the soul lives on after death. Thrasymachus: Yes, I agree.
Philosopher: And further, is it not true that the mind fails in some cases to distinguish between actual and merely potential existence? Thrasymachus: It is true.
Philosopher: Then S is P must be true of all predicative judgements? Thrasymachus: Certainly. Philosopher: And A is not -A?
Thrasymachus: It is not. Philosopher: So that every judgment may be taken either intensively or extensively. Thrasymachus: Indubitably. Philosopher: And this is through the activity of the apperceptive unity of self-consciousness, sometimes called cognition?
Thrasymachus: Indisputably. Philosopher: Which arranges the phenomena of the sense-manifold in accordance with the principles of a primitive synthesis? Thrasymachus: Incontrovertibly. Philosopher: And these principles are the Categories? Thrasymachus: Yeah! Philosopher: Thus the universal is real and self-existent, and the particular only a quality of the understanding. So, in the end, your opinion is found to coincide with mine, and we agree that there is no a priori necessity for the continued existence of unperceived phenomena?
Thrasymachus: No. My opinion is that you are talking a lot of balderdash and ought to be locked up. Am I not right? Philosopher: I suppose you are.
It will be observed that the Socratic Method is not infallible, especially when dealing with Thrasymachus. Methuen, Socrates: I see, from the few words which Polus has uttered, that he has attended more to the art which is called rhetoric than to dialectic.
Polus: What makes you say so, Socrates? Socrates: Because, Polus, when Chaerephon asked you what was the art which Gorgias knows, you praised it as if you were answering someone who found fault with it, but you never said what the art was. Polus: Why, did I not say that it was the noblest of arts? Socrates: Yes, indeed, but that was no answer to the question: nobody asked what was the quality, but what was the nature, of the art, and by what name we were to describe Gorgias.
It came to be called the elenchus , from the Greek for "refute. For at the point of being stripped of all that they knew, those who could bear Socrates' sting, discovered something remarkable. They did not learn anything theoretical, let alone how to win an argument. Rather, they gained a profound perception of what it is to be human.
That, in turn, set them on a path that steered them to what might be called the good life. It fired their creativity and love, and yielded the kind of wisdom that isn't readily expressed in words, or when forced into words only produces platitudes that seem rather obvious — like the one that sums up them all: " the unexamined life is not worth living.
For Plato, to do so was tantamount to a religious experience, to realising something in the deepest part of your being that, surprisingly, you simultaneously know to be true all along. Hence, Plato's Socrates is portrayed as a messenger from the gods. He has an inner voice, or daemon, who speaks to him, though strictly in accordance with his ignorance; it only offers intuitions about what is not the case, or what is not right.
So letting go is at the heart of the Socratic way of life. Only then can you discern more. And there is always more to discern, since that is only to be human. The modern mind might resist such a portrayal of the man. But it at least offers a solution to what is otherwise something of a conundrum. It's worth noting that no less an authority than Plato's most famous pupil Aristotle classified his dialogs as "fiction.
Plato's aim was to teach philosophy, not record history and he's on record as endorsing the alteration or wholesale invention of "facts" to suit philosophical or pedagogical goals. Since Plato himself does not appear as a character in his own dialogs, we can assume he's not recording conversations where he was himself present.
In order for them to be accurate, therefore, Socrates would have needed to have accurately recounted these conversations to Plato, who would then have also needed to remember them accurately for in some cases quite a long period of time before writing them down.
This seems especially unlikely in light of Plato's aforementioned contempt for factual accuracy. Therefore, while Socrates likely would have had conversations with many of the people mentioned in the dialogues since they tend to have been well-known figures of a certain social status in a fairly small community , the chances that those conversations were reproduced accurately are vanishingly small.
The most likely exceptions to this general rule are the trial Apology and death Phaedo of Socrates. In particular, the Apology was written relatively close to the time of the event it depicts, and Plato would almost certainly have personally been in attendance. It's also one of the few of Plato's Socratic works that depicts an event also attested to by independent observers.
Judging by their accounts, Plato's version is neither entirely truthful nor entirely invented. The Phaedo is generally considered to have been written later, and Plato explicitly mentions in the text that he was NOT present when it happened which reads like a signal to readers to view it as fiction so it's even less likely to be accurate.
All the other dialogs are increasingly less likely to be non-fictional, for the reasons detailed above. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Did Plato record actual conversations in his dialogues? Ask Question. Asked 5 years, 11 months ago.
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