Rick Roderick on Socrates and the Life of Inquiry [full length]

[Music] a course in philosophy and human values may seem paradoxical because philosophy was that discipline in the in our traditions that's Western traditions Western civilization that began with the search for unconditioned knowledge unconditioned by human knowledge of things that transcend this world or any other that traditions very much alive in philosophy today mostly in formal logic in mathematics where it seems in place and professional philosophers have a name for that tradition it's the analytic tradition in philosophy of course in philosophy and human values has very little to gain from that tradition and the reason for that I think is quite simple it's because philosophy and its interaction with societies cultures and in its historical context is very difficult to quantify it's very difficult to turn into a logical formula and there's a matter of fact no one I think and I've met a lot of philosophers since that's what I do for a living has ever demonstrated that a deductive argument a logical argument one that's purely formal has ever solved a single philosophical problem except internally though the ones they made themselves it's it's kind of like housekeeping where you spill the stuff and then you clean it up and you spill it again and a lot of analytic philosophies like that what I'd like to try today is to do something a little different and that's the place philosophy in a historical context and then go through that and follow the mutation of problems centered on what it means to be human a question that for me will begin with for me will begin with a kind of skeptical attitude in other words we won't begin as though we know what human nature is a common and I think absolutely insidious kind of fallacy promulgated especially in a society like ours it's capitalist and so on where subjects need to be of a certain kind in order to function in the state and in the economy so it's it's important in a society like that to have a rigid definition of what human being is for for a whole host of reasons that I hope will become apparent but I'd like to begin with it is a kind of skeptical questioning questioning and so I'll come to my first topic a book standardly used in introductory philosophy courses and one that I'll refer to only briefly today is the trial and death of Socrates by a smile a little known Arthur named Plato so if there if there are any members of the audience or of that are watching this that are worried about is this going to be a talk sort of off of the standard texts you know some talk about the lesbian the phallus in romantic novels don't worry about it we're gonna be talking about Plato so you can relax chill out it's not gonna be it's not gonna be a problem Socrates inaugurates the Western philosophical tradition in a very interesting way and one of the ways he does it is by separating philosophical discourse in a kind of a way from scientific discourse we can think of the earliest Greek philosopher Staley zanuck samandar and annex a gross and others who studied the cosmos and I think you're familiar with the word cosmos from other famous television shows I mean you've heard Carl Sagan cause most you know and that it's kind of the way you need to say it for the Greeks too because we get other English words from cosmos for example cosmetic where for the Greeks the cosmos was sort of cosmetic it appeared and that was enough and it appeared to be harmonious and beautiful and orderly that made it an object of study if it had appeared chaotic to them it wouldn't have been an object of study it'll be it was its ardor that made it possible to study it and we know from at least we think we know from the text that when Socrates was young he studied in this tradition and was interested in the cosmos in what things were made of and the Greeks had rather simple answers things were made of fire some thought of water or some thought of earth fire water in a various other accounts and for our rather long time in Western civilization the account that there were four elements earth fire water and air was the dominant scientific account for a long time in any case socrates began in this tradition but he inaugurates philosophy and in the spirit in which I hope I'm going to talk about it for the next few hours by changing the focus away from the investigation into the movements of stars and the composition of the earth and directs the investigation of philosophy towards human beings and this this should be well known I mean it's an ordinary thing to know about Socrates know thyself for Socrates was the beginning of wisdom and Socrates for him this was more than a mere motto if you this all the Socratic dialogues are in a sense it's important to understand first at their dialogues they're written in dialogic form in Greek society and this will be my first amateur or sociological remark in Greek society knowledge comes to be in a public place where reasoned arguments have to take place in the open in a public forum that's to be greatly contrasted just by point of contrast with a society like ours where most of the important arguments that shape our destiny or secret in Greek society that's unthinkable because a polis is a place where the only force that a free person is supposed to recognize is that particularly unforced force of the better argument that's what that's what differentiates you from a slave you don't argue with slaves in Greek society you they obey and you tell and you tell them but when it's a discussion among free citizens they can't recognize your force as part of the argument it has to be that strange unforced force that happens when someone just convinces you with an argument that you go wow I think that's better than an argument I think you're right so the dialogues are built on that form of political life where dialogue is essential to knowledge later in the course when we discussed the rise of modern society we will get a peculiar new way of human beings understanding themselves a way that well that I'll attach the name decart to right now a way where you sort of introspect and figure things out sort of a forerunner to Shirley MacLaine except more sophisticated you kind of introspect and sort of talk to your own inner self well for the Greeks this was no way to achieve knowledge it was through talking with other people and I don't want to make this sound sort of - I don't know prep-school e because if you read the the dialogues Socrates is flirting with both the men and the women that he didn't you talk to him mostly talks to me and this is Western tradition writes this great the women are I guess doing the housework and showing up you know in the in the jail cell when he's about to die and stuff and whining or whatever however these guys wrote it you know that's why I'm a little dubious about some of the texts in any case the the the two important points that I hope that I've sort of moved around one Socrates turns the investigation of philosophy towards human concerns and away from the cosmos and that already begins a fateful distinction that will later be discussed in I guess the book was in the 40s or whatever CP snows book the two cultures okay the culture of science and the culture of the humanities that split has its origin in a way in Socrates turning his attention away from sort of one of the cultures the culture that was going to investigate nature and human beings as though they were simply in it somewhere and the culture that investigates human beings who are human in other words as human and as opposed to as one specie of Hmong other or whatever so that's that's and and then that makes knowing yourself a crucially important part of knowledge that'll make this as simple as I can I love to use references to movies you know I mean not many of us read anymore but a lot of us go to movies in Superman one okay let's get out get out into a real case okay in Superman one little baby Superman is flying from the very sophisticated planet to earth and there are all these knowledge crystals and I didn't like the series that much okay so no frown at me it's nothing great a movie astray ting here these knowledge crystals tell him all the known physics of this advanced civilization but the last and most precious crystal that he gets in the ship is symbolically important since now that you know all this you know all these things you may want to know what is most important and that's who you are and so the last crystal is supposed to give him the socratic style of knowledge so Socrates believed and this is a nice illustration because Socrates believed that one could have all the other kind of knowledge and be totally lost totally aimless if one didn't have the other kind of knowledge which was knowledge of oneself and this is nice to remember today I think it's a cautionary tale because we live today in a society saturated with information just information I which I would want to radically distinguish just sweet and distinguished from wisdom or knowledge but just saturated with information but I think in our society the Socratic question is not only difficult to answer but even a sense for its importance is being lost we just saturated with information we're told so frequently who we are given a certain set of roles that are prearranged pre-established and within which in a free society one is able to very slightly in other words they're to give you an example we all know what a yuppie is but we know within that category there's some variation possible you could be sandy-haired or red-haired you could wear a black Reeboks or white ones I mean there's a little but this is I'm trying to give you a sense for the strange distance between historical distance between the Socratic search for wisdom and this kind of way of finding out who you are it's very different it's a very different thing okay let's see should I should I finally throw in an argument no not yet Socrates in his in the dialogues his primary antagonists are called the Sophists and the best historical analogy for the Sophists and I don't like to use the word the way most philosophers do his pejorative because the word softest they were simply folks who went around and they taught things they taught how to do well in the marketplace business school they taught how to win your cases in the law court law school you know they taught how to run the estate well public policy at Duke or wherever so you know I mean they went in and they got paid for doing this in fact it's interesting that it's a trial of Socrates here's one defense that's really convincing that he's not a saw fost is that he doesn't get paid to teach of course under that rubric in our society we're all Sophists right there everybody in front of a podium at every University so Sophists whether they belong to the National Association of scholars or not they're still getting paid and the presumption by at least some Greeks was that if you got paid to say something it was a it was to be taken with a great deal of suspicion so that was a defense of Socrates well the Sophists had a general view that backed it up that I think today again is a view that we can understand in our own time the the Sophists position is stated variously by various office I'm not gonna run through the various ones in in most of the dialogues a Socrates will his interlocutor will be one of them in most of the Socratic dialogues he'll be talking to one of these people but our protagonist is the best-known Sophists and his view has been has come down and it's become very famous and it is man is the measure of all things now that is an ambiguous statement it's one that Socrates wanted to point out the ambiguity in man is the measure of all things can be read you in a modern ear that sounds like individuals are constructed historical category by the way individuals are the locus of knowledge and you've heard that argument I'm sure in regard to art for example someone will say well you know I don't know what art is but I know what I like and that's a knockdown argument in art a lot of us think you know I happen to like Mel Gibson's Hamlet you know it's weird I like it but uh and that's supposed to be a knock knock down argument on this argument by the Sophists though knowledge is impossible because each individual will have just like a nose an opinion and a right to it and no one's will be more right than the other that's one way to understand his position another more sophisticated way to understand Protagoras is for him to be saying something like this each tribe or cultures standard of the standards of knowledge will be the standards that will hold for that tribe or that culture that's a more sophisticated version of what some philosophers like to call relativism now Socrates is a very peculiar person and and this and I'll connect this back up with human values in a minute because Socrates won't accept either version of the relativists argument and in our context one would think that would make him a dogmatist I mean because we're all I think immersed in a culture of what I might call sophomoric relativism by that I mean we go well that's my opinion damn it you know sort of like interview interviewing someone for yes I did I what that's what I think damn it a little nuke over Baghdad damn it you know and an old Henry goes well I told Bill's opinion you know it's fair I respect that and in a democracy we're supposed to be democratic about knowledge you know right well everybody's got a right to be a damn fool and and I'm not opposed to that necessarily just want to point out that there that that doesn't end debate right I mean you can still argue with old Henry or old Harry or old Sam you can tell I've been in North Carolina too long from these name anyway Socrates's position was that the relativist had to be wrong but it didn't follow from that that Socrates himself had to know the absolute truth in other words Socrates thought that he absolutely knew there must be some truths that were absolutely important for human beings without making the further claim that he knew what they were see the further claim is what I like to call the Jerry Falwell claim I'm not a relativist there are absolute truths and by God I know them whether by God is more than a mirror you know conjoining I mean that's really by God I know them well Socrates held a position that was neither one of these there must be absolute truths but I myself don't possess them now that gives the explanation and I'm sure all of you have read a Socratic dialogue at one time or another most people have been forced to at one time or another right and a peculiar but most people been forced to read one and well it's irritating to read just old man's questioning we need to remember Socrates was very ugly according to the bus you know his faces kinda like me sort of short fat ugly irritating person and as Nietzsche said to be ugly in Greece was already an objection you know and I mean I guess that's where the modern word for Greeks comes from on university campuses right because to show up uglies already you know you're out and so to be ugly in Greece for sorting objection Socrates is fat ugly little guy as I say it had these held this up I'm sorry engaged in this practice of questioning and it's irritating to read them because you got all of those are just those questions just run in circles if you ever got any that's that feeling when you reason with it just silly that's not getting anywhere it's a kind of an American response you know well what's he getting at you know when's it gonna get around to it well the Socratic procedure the dialogues may not be to get around to anything just the pure charm and beauty of the talk may itself contain a glimmer of truth or transcendence it's not necessary in all the dialogues that he get to something I mean the the power of thought just for its own autonomy and its own beauty might be something that Greeks were interested in in conversation for its own sake we're a little too busy now for that kind of thing but just for its own sake it might be interesting so uh Socrates held this position if I say a middle ground position which is that there must be absolute truths but he didn't know them why that's important because that gives a reason for the dialogues when Socrates questions people about beauty honour justice truth I finally mentioned the big words philosophies after right when he talks about them and they all sound like pompous words today I just feel crazy - you know discussing philosophy today because in a society sort of where I as one modern philosopher put it cynical reason prevails the very use of these words is bound to just sound like advertising slogans that's the objective context within which people who try to teach what I teach have to fight a kind of historical battle because I mean I and the hell can I compete with well I'm on television right now hello now how can I compete with a huge media and advertising industry that uses these same words that used to code the most important things about human beings as the characteristics of products which you can get in a mediated way by consuming them see it's just so difficult then to re-establish sort of their meaning but for Socrates it was crucially important to try to get at the meanings of these words truth beauty goodness courage justice and so on and it was imparted not only for its own sake and for what it would tell him about himself and about his fellow citizens so it was a profoundly civic act thus when Socrates was found guilty at his trial he suggested that the state should not execute him or exam even send him to exile but rather should put him up as a public figure to be supported by the state forever for the service he performed for it okay which were a great trial that was not a good counter sentence that was liable to irritate the jury right you know could really tick off the jury I didn't seem to hurt in the ollie North affair but you know Socrates probably didn't have that good a speech coach or whatever in any case let me give you the argument that Socrates gives against relativism because it's one of our little philosophical tricks we learn from him and may itself be a piece of sophistry but against people like protagonist Socrates would argue as follows and this is probably familiar to at least some of you he would take the proposition the truth for example being one important concept the truth is relative about which he would ask protagonists is the sentence you just uttered the truth is relative its self a relative truth or an absolute one well if protagonists are some other Sophists responds that it's an absolute one then there is such a thing as absolute truth and they've discovered at least one of them that the truths relative on the other hand if the truth is relative then if you hold Socrates is view that there is such a thing as absolute truth you're absolutely right - you see how the dilemma works either way the relativists responds a space is opened up in which it's possible to search for truths that transcend the here and now because if they either there's one absolute truth that there aren't any so then there then you might begin to say well there might be others you figured out one maybe I could - on the other hand if you respond the other way then at least a view like Socrates is still absolutely right because everybody's absolutely right of course Socrates is - so this famous sort of self referential problem continues this day to be a sort of thorn in the side of what I would call soft relativism it really is a problem for that position okay the back again now to the to the human meaning of the Socratic project and now I'm gonna do just a little biography which is not really well biography of this kind is supposed to have a little philosophic import not only was Socrates ugly and sort of a pain in the behind but the people that he questioned on the various topics in order to find out more about himself and about his fellow citizens were experts and this is another point where I would like to contrast us with modern society it's really hard to imagine a citizen publicly confronting Dan Quayle and being allowed to go on for 30 minutes on the well since Quayle reads the Republic he reads Plato so you ought to be able to do this right or what is it that he tries to read Plato that's that's I guess that's different but anyway to get a Socratic parallel you need to imagine another free citizen encountering him and going what is statesmanship say all the Socratic dialogues are sort of the Socratic ones they're Plato writes either later download the Socratic dialogues are all of the form what is X where the X in question will be one of these important words to human beings so you know what is statecraft or politics and he will go to someone who is understood to be an expert by the society I mean they'll be in that if it's courage he'll go to a general and ask what is courage now I think how Socrates got in trouble other than being ugly and irritating was that as he questioned these people it became apparent that they didn't have the faintest study of what the hell they were doing which is a feeling I get every time I walk into a mall I look at people and I just would like to sit what are you doing and you know after you get the word shopping what the hell do you suppose they'd say well it's it's Saturday and everybody's got to be somewhere and you know I mean Socrates would like nail you and keep going with that water you do in question well what are you doing carried the connotations of more than just right now but what are you doing with your life what's it about to have a theme is there anything important going on which is he an even more important question today when the planet is full of more people rights and have lived in the whole previous history of the world we need an answer to that just to justify taking up the amount of air we do there's so many people on the globe we're in somebody's way right now so it's good to have an answer to the question of what the hell are you doing so philosophy I'd like to start this course with the vital question that we should at least try to develop some answer in our own life to a question as simple as what the hell am i doing and he would be surprised I mean some of you go I know what I'm doing well if you Socrates the presumption was that if you thought about it long enough you wouldn't be so sure you wouldn't be so sure about it in any case I was talking about how you got in trouble listen and trying to get in a little trouble tell you maybe Socrates would confront a general a statesman a poet you know great artist what's great art well we know the kind of answer should get there if you ever read the interviews with William Faulkner aren't we all glad that he wrote that he didn't know what he was doing because if he was doing what he said in his interviews he was doing the books would have been just exhaust but because he did know what the hell he was doing we were lucky the books are great thank god they're not as stupid as what he said about them say and Socrates so would ask a poet what are you doing in the poet to say something completely off the wall stuff and thank goodness that they express themselves as poets and not didn't have to explain themselves but the Socratic drivers to get people to explain themselves now a social thing that happened in Greece that was unfortunate for Socrates was that the young would gather around to listen to these conversations and you can imagine a scene something like this with some young people gathered around dan quayle forced not to leave and nobody to pull him away in a 30-minute discussion with at least a clever person like Socrates about statecraft one can imagine a sort of fifteen or sixteen year old today raised on Public Enemy and MTV the kind of hilarity that might arise in the irritation that Quayle might feel trapped in such a situation he would consider it trapped but for the Greeks that would be of the essence of being a free person to be in a situation of dialogue like that in any case it's another difference in any case the the this got him in a lot of trouble and was another factor that led up to the rather dramatic title of this book which is really a collection of the various dialogues about the trial and death of Socrates which led up to his trial and subsequently being sentenced to death so philosophy has in terms of human values I think a rather noble beginning it but it begins in a quest for meanings that transcend the here and now these for me are not necessarily Universal and certainly have more to say about local conditions than Universal ones I do think we can make historical comparisons I've been doing that pretty routinely up here but he thought that these questions had something profoundly important to tell us about what human beings were now one one further point that I want to make about Socrates and about the Greek way of life as as it will be presented throughout here and this is by way of sort of distancing myself from a rather standard presentation of Socrates we now know that what are called the Greeks and what I've been referring to as the Greeks we know from the scholarship of African Americans and others that this was largely and my whole lectures been based on this text I and I don't mind evoking these Greek values because I think they're still very important but you should to have this note of suspicion and that's that largely it was 19th century German scholarship that as it were invented the Greeks for us I mean at one time they were just you know like in the 16th century they were one among other earlier civilizations you know the 19th century Germans if you know this we're extremely impressed with the Greeks it's kind of obvious if one looks at their art or reads their literature right they were very impressed with with the Greeks and what they found out about them in any case the Greeks as understood today through that tradition is the only possible topic that I can bring up here because in a certain sense and this is not a relativist argument the past is only accessible through readings and reinterpretations of the past in the absence of a time machine I mean I think that's at the basis of our wonderful time machine fantasy about history is all of us would kind of like to know what it was really like you know what was it really like the trouble with the past is it's kind of like the present we don't know we don't know what it was really like and a further worry is that even if we had been there though the odds that people who have been socialized to speak an informational language not to seek these things that are advertising slogans to us it's very doubtful we'd understand what the hell was going on if we were there might sound is peculiar as it does to my students to be forced to read these things what the devil is that addressed all this time talking about beauty or when it's goodness me good grief I would like to now make a historical point about something that a philosophers today are more aware of than they used to be and which is important not all kinds of inquiry can appear in just any setting there are conditions for the possibility of certain questions being asked and in the case of Greek society they went along with a relatively unproblematic discourse for quite a while especially during the hot the very high days of their empire when their empire was really in a secure position in that social setting and under those social conditions there was no Socrates and no condition for the possibility of their being Lord and here's why because in the sort of classic Greek language the one that comes out of the you know the oral tradition of Homer and others it would be insane to ask something like what is courage because the response which many of you may have had in the back of your mind as I was speaking would be don't you have a dictionary I know there's we all know we know what it means we've got a cohesive society we're unified it's like about the war now we're all together on this we know what courage is so there would have been no spice for the Socratic inquiry it was only after a rather unpleasant experience in a war Greek war someone may know about it kind of a famous war good journalists back then to society he's fairly decent journalist could have got a job with the post probably but after a tragic experience with the war and a military dictatorship the words that had become standard in their culture and had been used unproblematically with meanings attaching to definite positions began to be sources of irritation and so the ground and the possibility for Socrates inquiry was not really his individual genius although that itself is is a nice thing and not against it but it was not possible except against a background of a society that had deeply begun to question what these words really meant and one can't help but think for example to try to make this parallel come alive that the radical questioning that's been going on in the universities about the canons of knowledge the instruments of knowledge has not been profoundly affected as Time magazine admits and but no it's clear that the current struggle over the Canon and the meaning of these classic texts all of which I I've selected only classic text for this course I'm not gonna read them necessarily or discuss them in necessarily a classic way but the point of all this questioning is that after this country's experience in the 50s and the 60s of the both the civil rights movement in anti-war movement counterculture and so on it became again a problem to say what does it mean to be for example a good woman well there was something started in 1951 that that meant that clearly as a matter of debate now okay that clear there's like good examples pre-clear well I'll pick one that's a little more controversial what's a patriot became a matter of debate the way in sort of 1954 it was not all that confusing and and I'm old enough to remember people not being confused by it I think people want it to be non confusing again desperately they may want it more than they want even money which is amazing but the point is that philosophy philosophical inquiry of the dangerous kind as opposed to of the analytic boring academic kind philosophic inquiry of the dangerous kind catches a society at a moment when it's insecure about what it's what the main terms that hold it together mean like man woman patriot and in particular human being so that is the human edge of philosophy is that you catch a society at a moment of danger when a term or set of terms that are very important to the identity of a lot of people are in question are possible the questioning limit is at least possible it may be that we are today and since I'm trying to remind myself as I talk about eternal values and not being a relativist and I do think it's important to search for values that transcend the here and now on the other hand in the time since Socrates we have become more dubious about eternal ones me too we're all more dubious about those but I would like to look for values that transcend the here and now and for obvious reasons the obvious reasons in my case being that I think the ones that prevail here and now suck good English word right we all know what that means by the way it's interesting to note sidebar here for you amateur philosophers who want to read more books this kind most of the texts are translated to get those kind of words out of them but the language spoken by Socrates as recorded by Plato is a quiet is not a fancy language just filled with technical terms but it's a pretty ordinary Greek and it's only lighter sort of mid 20th century or early 20th century when philosophy starts to develop a professionalized vocabulary see in all its previous history it tried to communicate with at least some class of people it's only recently that it tries to communicate with no one I mean the Journal of philosophy if 12 people go down on the same flight there won't be any more Journal of philosophy because 11 guys ready for this other guy and that's you know I so I'm sure what I'm trying to do today is to broaden out the interest to philosophy a little more than that to the extent that that it means anything more than another niche in an intellectual marketplace already filled up with so much garbage should be lucky it's kind of like a big sail you're lucky to find the scarf you want because it just filled with crappy scarves and there's one you might want and so all I can do is to make philosophy and it's kind of inquiry insofar as it's critical insofar as it catches a society at a moment of danger insofar as it asks us who we are and who our fellow citizens are I want to make that look important like an attractive scarf in the pile I'd like to be able to give it more punch than that but then I'm speaking in the here and now in quite a dark moment of the history of this country in my opinion one I would discuss at length I mean I will the question period and outside in the hall and in and in public forums to the extent that it's still allowed to do so the first lecture I wanted to just introduce you to some of the themes I'll pursue throughout the lecture what does it mean that the grand theme and one that I certainly won't answer is at least lectures progress its what does it mean to be a human being I will try to localize the question today I've tried to say what it was like in a way what was it like how did the Greeks understand that a certain set of human practices and I said almost nothing about it except about the practice of Socrates so as we go through these lectures I'm going to play out various what I will call ways of living and the Socratic way is one of critical inquiry and this shouldn't be understood in the way we understand inquiry today as just sitting on your butt and looking through a microscope no inquiry in Socrates is sense critical inquiry is to go around in a kind of passionate search for what's really imparted where that itself is up for grabs it's not like you know what that is for sure Socrates doesn't just ask what's truth and beauty and the good he has one dialogue we ask what's fine and the best translation would sort of be the English fine in the sense of boy you're fine or didn't that fine and so that doesn't you know that doesn't sound like truth or beauty the dialogue is about what's fine I mean Socrates goes around looking for these things in order to get a fix on what is important about being human what's special about it in order also finally to disprove the adelphic Arkell who when i asked who was the wisest man in the world said Socrates and this was reported to him and he went this his nuts can't be truth I don't know anything and he finally figured out the riddle of the Oracle he was only the wisest man in Greece because he not only didn't know anything but he had a meta belief about that he knew that he didn't know anything very important distinction and as I make some of the rather dogmatic remarks that I'm gonna make through the lecture I should make my own position as a philosopher clear not a relativist and I'm not an absolutist in the sense in which I've discussed them today I'm a fallibilist that means something like this the fallibilist is is someone who Cashin utley believe certain things passionately believe certain things some of them quite bizarre is you'll find out as we go along but about those beliefs I believe that they could be wrong a peculiarly modern attitude but one that I find myself forced to through long and bitter historical experience not only philosophical by the way but historical in a more bloody and mundane sense it seems only wise policy both philosophically and politically to be able to hold a belief passionately but to have a belief about that belief that it could be wrong some of you may think that that's absolutely paradoxical that if one must believe something passionately then you've got to just believe it and I hope that turns out to be wrong because it doesn't seem to make me feel any more schizophrenic than the rest of you to both know that I hold a series of beliefs quite deeply and yet to have a belief about them at another order that they could be wrong I mean I hope that that will work anyway in any case that's not a bad characterization of the position of fallibilism and I'm a fallibilist about fallibilism let me go ahead and go a little further which means that that whole stance could be wrong so I'm a fallibilist all the way down see because even that way of looking at knowledge could be wrong and so on and to be philosophical is not to stop pursuing a question when it becomes inconvenient it is the opposite in that sense the kind of inquiry I want to pursue it's kind of the opposite of a televised news conference where everyone knows the limits of questioning and obeys without question like slaves and lackeys beneath the level of humanity or free human beings how to make us ashamed but philosophy doesn't behave in that way not at its best it has been known to in fact like religion it has frequently served the powers that be I'm trying to pick out a certain group of philosophers that at their best don't do that okay at their best a question radically but I'd like to distinguish that from say a news conference where the spectrum of questions are quite simple and very very prescribed and and moreover the answers are already written and we could supply them without waiting for the parties to answer if you watch enough of this stuff I mean I'm become a CNN junkie so now I can just give the report before they give it I can just say well what happened in the war today we want short summary of the news lots of them died not many of us did we want you know I mean I heard that for seven years earlier in my life there's a light at the end of the tunnel well whenever you see a light at the end of the tunnel philosophy reminds you that there is at least the damn possibility that the light at the end of the tunnel will turn out to be a cave a candle at the end of a cave I mean that doesn't mean that it's going to come out on the other side of anything worthwhile okay Socrates know thyself ask embarrassing questions and yet try to avoid his sight which is uh don't be tried found guilty and executed unless you're his age so I want to leave you with a sort of joke about that that about philosophy for this first lecture and that's that it's a very interesting question whether Socrates would have escaped from prison many of you know the story and I didn't want to repeat it and waste my 45 minutes it's a very interesting question about whether Socrates would have chosen to escape from prison which was one of his choices if he had been a 25 year old Enquirer as opposed to a 70 what one or two year old Inquirer would have been very interesting I think the choice would have been quite different he might then have considered some of his friends plans to escape certainly we know that Aristotle later did he he fled Athens and said I don't want them to send twice against philosophy and so that means that at some point I'll have to leave Duke so that they won't send twice against irritating West Texans who are just interested in reading philosophy books although I wouldn't say just and I do think that the analogy that I'd like to leave your attention on is that this kind of critical inquiry if it can be carried out at all can be carried out when societies are troubled in other words when the meanings of words become topics for debate and redefinition and that's not a matter of just debate because the way we describe our lives and understand them is intimately and inextricably connected to the way we live them you describe yourself as an insurance salesman it's okay I'm not mad at any of you if you do that but that's all the description that you've got that's going to structure a certain kind of life that set of descriptions and those sets of beliefs and I want to open up a possibility that there might be a way even under these conditions to expand such definitions maybe not eternal ones but localizable and to be American in the last instance usable ones [Music]

Channel: The Partially Examined Life

Views: 72,296

Rating: 4.9379473 out of 5

Keywords: rick, roderick, Socrates (Philosopher), Full, human, values

Id: XQ_hUxuumk0

Length: 46min 19sec (2779 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 26 2012