Socrates & the Socratic Turn

welcome back to this series of online lectures in my introduction to philosophy course this week we're going to be looking at Socrates and the Socratic turn so this is following up on our discussion of the pre-socratics next week and getting ready for our discussion of Plato now before I actually go into the lecture I want to spend just a moment trying to make something clear before we begin now Socrates was an actual historical person and he lives from roughly the Year 469 before year 1 and he's executed in the year 399 and we'll talk about that as we go through this but so we know the dates that he actually lived unfortunately Socrates is one of these characters in history who never writes anything of his own so in fact we have reports that Socrates was anti writing and he argued that once you write something down you no longer need to remember it so your memory therefore will become worse if you depend on these external devices instead of using one's own memory to store things and this is important for Socrates that we keep the oral tradition alive and not diminish our memories by using writing so he has reasons for resisting writing it's not the case that he simply refuses to write things down or for instance is ignorant of how to write so that clouds the issues because we have no direct evidence of what Socrates himself thought instead what we have are other historical sources which depict aspects of the character of Socrates he was avid ently a very well-known figure in Athens at this time and his life has been examined over and over again so chief among these is Plato and we'll talk about Plato's views more particularly in the next lecture but it's important to stop here and make this kind of clarify cut or e remarks plato was the student of Socrates and what wrote many dialogues in which Socrates features as the main character and these more than likely would have been written after the death of the historical Socrates now Plato also wrote essays but those have become lost to us through history so even though they are mentioned in other places we don't have actually any of the texts themselves so though we might find reference to some treatise of Plato on this topic or that topic we don't have that anymore what we have are these dialogues which were written for popular audiences and they usually depict a famous conversation between Socrates and some other pre-socratics or some of his followers so for instance in one famous dialogue the Republic we find at the beginning a very famous discussion about what the nature of justice is where Socrates is the main character now it's not really clear which of these dialogues are supposed to represent the actual historical Socrates and which of these dialogues represent Plato's own developed views where he's using Socrates as a character as a way of praying paying tribute to his teacher he's using Socrates as a sort of mouthpiece for his own views and scholars debate this saying well these dialogues represent Socrates and those dialogues represent Plato's own thoughts and here's a mix of them some some authors just forgo this and attribute all of this stuff to Plato and call this Plato's philosophy so there's a big dispute about what the right way to characterize what we know about Socrates and and what is actually attributed to him now when I was learning this stuff and people have moved past this it seems by the way the way we thought about this when I was in graduate school way back in the dinosaur ages was that you could kind of tell by looking at the individual dialogues and trying to figure out what the psychology of the Socrates character was so there's one set of dialogues where the Socrates character ends the conversation in where things are up in the air Socrates never claims to have any knowledge he's always seeking after it talk more about that in just a moment but there's a kind of unsettled ending at the end of the discussion where they simply have identified a problem and are not very clear about the way to solve that problem whereas later what you find in other dialogues is a very different kind of Socrates this kind of Socrates is one that has an answer and he wants to tell you about the theory that he's developed so it was argued famously that these first kind of Socrates is the historical person and the second kind of Socrates is the Plato's version where he's developing his own views and that's not hard and fast and people disagree as I've said already but that's roughly the way that we'll be presenting the material and even if it isn't historically accurate one thing we can say for this way of doing it is its organized much of the discussion about this topic so it's in this is sort of from our period what we have taken the main way of doing this is and so I think it's worth knowing even if scholars are currently debating whether or not it's correct so we will in general stick to this kind of view that we can determine the historical Socrates and most interestingly this really is most typifies in the book the Republic one of Plato's famous dialogues so chapter one of the Republic as I mentioned previously has a discussion about the nature of justice and chapter one ends where things are very unsettled and there's a particular style of discussion with a sophist named threat Symmachus excuse me there's a discussion with a sophist named threat Symmachus and the discussion ends very up in the air threatened MCUs storms away and says i don't know what's going on here I'm right but I don't know how to prove it and we won't really look at that discussion here but I think that that's an indication of the thing I was talking about previously of the kind of actual figure that historic historically stoic Socrates might have been so then in book 2 of the Republic you find the other character of Socrates he's got a theory about how to answer the problems which were raised in the first part of first chapter of the book and he presents a certain theory as the solution to this problem and so that's the way we're going to be viewing the relationship between Socrates and Plato Socrates is coming along and setting up a lot of these problems but not really offering a lot of positive insight into how you could solve these problems but yet maintaining that there are solutions and then we'll see Plato is coming along and trying to offer an actual theory about how you could develop these ideas of his teacher Socrates okay so with that grain of salt in mind keeping very clear that this is kind of a recreation of something that's very controversial let's go ahead and get started so on this way of thinking about Socrates he's not interested in questions about the nature of reality so there's a very famous a part of a dialogue where Socrates is telling his audience about the time he came into contact with what we've been calling the pre-socratic philosophers so in particular he had heard about a philosopher whom we did not talk about philosopher named anaxagoras and he this anaxagoras person had distinguished himself amongst the pre-socratics as claiming that it was mind which was the ultimate cause and structure basic element out of which everything else was made so that what they called noose in the greek as opposed to water or fire or aperian as these other pre-socratics had had hypothesized so here's an axe acorus and he says it's mind and the young Socrates reports that he's very taken with this idea that mind somehow orders the universe and that it might even be the fundamental basic principle out of which everything else comes so he goes to question anaxagoras he goes to listen to him read a book and he asked them questions and Socrates reports that he's disappointed with the kind of answer that are given by these followers of anaxagoras they see mind is merely another mechanical principle not so much different than fire or water but they don't see what Socrates thought was important was looking for the explanation of things in terms of their purpose why were they built so what is going to be called their Tilos or function he doesn't find that kind of explanation there and he's dissatisfied he wants to know the answers to a different set of questions so as a way to make this more precise let's talk a little bit about what kinds of questions he had in mind when he says he's interested in the state of one's soul so for instance he's interested in the question what is courage socrates was a soldier he distinguished himself in battle there's a very famous account not from Plato as I recall but from another source where Socrates was a soldier in in a war and he saved his friend by running into the his friend was wounded in the middle of a battlefield and Socrates runs out throws him over his shoulders and carries him back to safety and this would have been very dangerous as you could perhaps imagine put yourself in the position of a person who's fighting in a war like they did in those days where you are hand-to-hand combat with swords and pikes and those kinds of things and when you throw a person over your shoulder you can't really use a sword or shield and defend yourself in the normal manner so you'd be running across this battlefield virtually exposed to any kind of danger and that's of course why they commended Socrates for courage and for bravery for risking his life but instead of accepting this at face value Socrates begins to use this as an opportunity to ask questions about what courage is what does it mean to be courageous or how do we understand that concept so another question he was deeply interested in is the question of what it means to be a good person and we'll see that this is a sort of overarching concern that Socrates had the typical Athenian would have found the answer to be very obvious a good person is one who lives in their society performs well is serving the states and providing for their family and etc so a good person is someone who has the virtues as identified by the society whereas Socrates seems to want to answer this question in a very different way and we'll look briefly at a couple of the ways in which he wants to give a different answer to this but right now I'm just trying to give you the flavor of the way his interests run contrary to the interest of the pre-socratics as we've been understanding them so again the question what is justice it would have been very commonly held the Homeric notion of justice was correct which simply is the idea that you owe you give people what you owe to them and then you distinguish between your countrymen citizens from where from where you are and other persons so your enemies you owe to them a knife in the gut you don't owe them gratitude you owe them what you owe an enemy what to your friend of course you don't owe that to them you owe something else so there would have been a very definite idea of what was just in these areas and they would have been exemplified in the in the Homeric and mythology of the time but Socrates wants to give a different answer but he's challenging these notions and here's one that will look at as illustrative of these other ones will look very carefully at a dialogue called the Euthyphro which is where Socrates is having a discussion with a young priest whose name is Euthyphro so the topic of that discussion is what does it mean to be pious where that's a religious concept that has something to do with keeping being religious in the right way I don't want to try to precisely define it because that will in fact be the point of the the dialogue but will be also reading it as a larger as a stand-in for a larger question which is what is the nature of moral properties so we can ask what is goodness what is badness and this is something that Socrates is very interested in but notice that this set of questions is is distinct extremely distinct from the set of questions that the pre-socratic philosophers philosophers were interested in she's not concerned so much with questions about what the fundamental stuff is is it airs at water he's interested more in the state of one's own soul so what does it mean but I give you some examples but it's also important to be clear on what the average Greek person would have meant by the word that they're using which we translate as soul so at this time in the history it's thought that what the word actually used at the time meant was simply the differentiating quality between things which we're living and things which were nonliving so soul in the first instance as used in ancient Greece shouldn't be thought of as naming some kind of spiritual or mystic thing but rather simply as whatever it is that accounts for the difference between you and the dog on one hand and a rock and water on the other hand so clearly there's a difference dogs are live people are alive plants are live rocks are not alive there must be something which explains what that difference is and the common conception would have been that it's the sole living things have souls nonliving things lack souls now there was a lot of debate over what the exact metaphysical nature of the soul was so some of the pre-socratic philosophers were physicalist they thought that well the soul was a physical thing and you could probably guess that Democritus would be one of these persons he claimed that the soul was a kind of atom a spherical in shape the only thing that distinguished soul atoms from other atoms was their peculiar spherical cylindrical I mean sort of a crescent moon shape so that would have been the only difference in essence between them in other kinds of atoms would be in this kind of shape so you could have those worked for physicalists about the soul you had those which are dualist about the soul and we'll see Socrates himself as someone who thinks that the the soul is non-physical and survives the death of the body and that's a very famous doctrine that Socrates argues for in one of the early dialogues so saying there's a soul is just saying that the thing is alive so that's there's nothing religious there's no connotation with the word that we have and in fact more likely than not what they think typically identify something as living involves capacities for Thought sensation and independent movement so that we can more generally think of what they call soul as what we would call mind but if they don't line up exactly but that's where our concept would be closest to the one that they're talking about now to give you some idea of what Socrates is doing here he claimed that the soul was non-physical and that it was eternal that it could not be created or destroyed that it has a non-physical item it had it was impervious to any kind of change now he gives several arguments for this and we'll learn that they're given in an interesting situation namely they're given in the context of his awaiting his own execution in the dialogue that we're talking about here the Phaedo which we won't pay too much attention to but we'll mention this much of it at least so as he's awaiting his own execution his friends are wondering if he's scared to die and etc and he's depicted as giving this argument for the immortality of the soul so he's not afraid to die because he thinks the soul cannot be killed only his body can be killed so the one argument that he gives is kind of interesting he starts from the conception of the soul as the essence of life now notice that would have just followed from the average Greek person's conception of what a soul was the soul was the thing which made something be alive and when you lacked it you weren't living so if the soul is as commonly thought the essence of life then that thing can never die because that would be to admit that its opposite death could be instantiated in the soul so if the soul came to die then it itself would have to have the property of being dead but that would mean that the essence of life was dead and that can't be because the essence of life can only be the essence of life now notice what's going on here and I don't want to dwell too much on this argument although it is interesting but the point I want to make here is that he's invoking a principle which the pre-socratic philosophers at large would have already accepted so we can view Socrates as being continuous with these priests excuse me pre-socratic philosophers in the sense that he's adopting the use of reason these basic axioms which you might find as characterizing what geometers do namely that opposites can exist at the same place at the same time and he's trying to show that we can apply this to another area namely if we wanted to know whether or not the soul was immortal whether or not we survive our death then we can use these methods which these philosophers had developed to answer these kinds of questions now of course the way he's doing it is very different he's not writing a treatise he's having a discussion and we'll see that there are other differences still but the basic idea is that Socrates counts as a philosopher according to this idea that we've been developing over the course of these lectures he is someone who believes that there are certain truths which are discoverable by reason and that we can know various facts about reality by carefully reasoning about these things but he couples this with other views namely that the average person doesn't usually do this the average person doesn't engage in this kind of self-reflection the average person is more interested with fame wealth and honor than they are with the development of their own moral virtue or with finding out what the truth is about these questions and that's really what characterizes Socrates is that in a deep desire to get to the bottom of questions about the nature of one's self so we can say that's this is the first time that the human mind comes to be the target of philosophical inquiry and this is generally known as the Socratic turn it's a metaphor for Socrates turning away from questions about nature and taking up questions about what we would call ethics or moral psychology what is it that's going on in us what is the nature of our minds what is the nature of our selves ourselves and the things which make us human as opposed to asking questions about what is the nature of the table and very interestingly some scholars have compared this stage to the stage of development in a child growing up so if you think about a child when they first come into the world they're very focused on things outside of them they're focused on what's that can I put it in my mouth what's that what does it look like what does it taste like getting a feel for the world outside of them but of course at a certain point the child comes to notice itself as an object in the world and it begins to ask questions about itself as distinguished from other things and you can sort of see Socrates as initiating this phase in the in the development of human thinking about themselves in the development of philosophy it's this time when we've developed what we think is an interesting method rational deconstruction of the world reverse engineering of the rational principles which govern reality and now we have a couple of axioms which we can use to investigate the nature of that reality and Socrates points out we can do that also to ourselves we can understand ourselves better and he adds to that that you're not really living unless you engage in this kind of philosophical critical self analysis and so as we'll see a large part of what Socrates does is to try to initiate this mode of thinking in his fellow-citizens okay so what are we talking about here well let me give you some examples now one thing that Socrates very famously argued is that no one knowingly does evil now takes a second to really try to figure out what that might mean and there were a couple different things that it might mean to say that no one knowingly does evil but one thing that people have taken this to mean is that evil actions are ones which are done out of ignorance of what is really right and that if the person had known what was really right they would not have performed the evil action so on this view performing an evil action like breaking a promise stealing some money committing a murder any of these actions if a person had known that it was really wrong then they wouldn't have done it so what's generally thought is that what Socrates is working with here is a view of human beings as being genuinely excuse me genuinely interested in doing what's right that human beings are at nature by nature at bottom good and they always aim towards what is morally good but because of ignorance about what moral goodness is persons are often misled into thinking that something immoral is in fact good and this is a theme that we'll see Plato develop more fully the idea behind Socrates view here is that moral properties are objective that we can say that some things are right and that some things are wrong objectively right and objectively wrong not merely relative to a person their interest or their culture so that there are objective facts about what counts as beautiful for Socrates and Plato there are there are objective facts about what counts as good aesthetically pleasing and etc and we as people want to seek the good in the way that a moth will seek out a flame we're drawn to it but because it's hard to understand what real goodness is we often confuse ourselves so now a lot of people think that this is a very naive view how could you really think that people never knowingly do what's wrong I mean really fish think about it people say oh you know I shouldn't have stole that money from my roommate but I needed to get this bus ticket and that was the only way I could do it and you know I know it's wrong but that's what I had to do now notice though that this is really supporting the point that Socrates wants to make here we have a person who's doing something which we all sort of think of as wrong stealing money from their roommate but when they start saying it they start giving a justification for why even though it's kind of wrong they they had to do it right of course it's wrong to steal but I needed the money there was nothing else I could have done and it's that point that Socrates is making each person really has told themself a story whereby it's okay for them to do what they're doing so that no person wants to say yes I know it's wrong and I don't have any excuses but I'm going to do it anyway that there's somehow connected into our idea of what it means to be right and wrong that if you understand that it's right you want to do it and this starts a huge debate in philosophical ethics is it really the case that a person's are at bottom good that they really want to do what's right and also is it really true that there's this conceptual connection between knowing that something is right and then performing that action as we'll see later Plato develops these ideas and Aristotle really doesn't like them now these would be questions that you would deal with more fully in an ethics class but you can't help but talk about these issues when you talk about Socrates because these are the kinds of questions which he focuses on so continuing then again we have another example here where Socrates wants to argue that there are real objective moral properties and so one way of doing that is to try to show that there's something wrong in the more traditional view which many people would have held at this time and in fact many people still hold at our time which is that justice is simply whatever the strong people decide that it is and that there are no real rules in the natural world except the ones that strong people impose on weaker persons so this is the view that threats amicus defends in the first book of the Republic which I mentioned earlier and it's something which I have sometimes else in other lectures called the morality is for suckers view so on this view morality is well for suckers it's a system of rules which are made up by strong people as a way of getting you to focus on their interests instead of your own interests and so that justice is simply whatever the stronger party says that it is but of course you would be a fool if you didn't break one of those rules when you could get away with it so that the self-interested person realizes that these rules which we call morality are imposed on us by stronger persons and the smart person follows them when they have to but every chance they get they're breaking these rules to promote their own interest and Socrates is very against this view and is depicted in the first book of the Republic as offering an argument against it and we can't really go into the details of it but it is interesting to point out that what he ultimately does to thrasymachus is to get throw Symmachus to admit that on his definition namely that justice is in the interest of the stronger party on his definition some particular actions will come out as both adjusts and also in just and this famously particularly happens when the ruling class makes laws which are not in fact in their interest because of some error they're part so if the ruling class makes a law which they think is in their own interest and they impose it on the society then it is right for the society to do it that's what the law says but at the same time this thing does not actually promote the interest of the rulers and therefore there is a contradiction according to the theory the action is both just and in just I guess it should be unjust I should be thinking in English okay so I won't dwell on this here but if you read the first book of the Republic you can find this argument as I said we'll be focusing more on the Euthyphro which is this kind of master argument for the existence of moral properties but just to give you the idea of the kinds of things that Socrates was interested in and also to point out again this common theme that he really is a philosopher in the sense that we've been developing namely that he's relying on this basic axiom about opposites not existing at the same place at the same time it's just that he's applied it to a new topic matter and that's really the subject of the turn the Socratic turn is him taking this methodology which these earlier pre-socratic philosophers had developed and using it on a different set of questions one that are more relevant to the day-to-day lives of human beings okay so here's another one of these sayings so often what we get from Socrates is not an argument although there are some but mostly while we get our sayings expressions which Plato develops later and gives actual arguments and theoretical considerations for so here's another one Socrates is famous at his own trial for saying that the unexamined life is not worth living and this is something which I've mentioned previously already Socrates thought that the point of philosophy shouldn't be really in the first instance to discover the nature of tables and chairs but should in the first instance be considered with these questions which we've been asking and thinking about about what the best way to live is how one ought to conduct oneself and whether the mind is eternal or parish's at death these are the questions which matter and these are the questions which we should be asking and we want as much as possible to have beliefs which correctly mirror the way reality is and we can't do that we can't achieve that goal unless we critically examine our beliefs so Socrates has in the background this picture that we're all aiming for what the good is that we have as this as our goal as our purpose this is again an illustration of his dissatisfaction with the pre-socratic way of thinking they weren't thinking in terms of purposes in terms of goals so what we're interested in is achieving this knowledge of the good of what really is objectively good in the world and until we do that we're not going to live lives which are happy we may think that we're happy but we won't really be happy and this again is another theme a one will touch on shortly so that if you're not trying to figure out whether your beliefs track the true what's real if instead you merely accept what's told to you and believe it without questioning it then you're not living a life which is fully engaged in Socrates compares this to sleep walking through life you're not engaging with your beliefs even ones you hold very deeply and this attitude is often taken as sort of symbolic of what the philosopher is up to so Socrates is it's considered the prototypical philosopher in this sense he is someone who wants to make sure that their beliefs are in fact true that he's not merely accepting things which are told by history by convention by his parents by a society but is instead interacting with each belief asking what is the answer to this question what does it mean to be courageous sure the society says I'm courageous because I did these actions but what is the true nature of courage such that my actions count as examples of it and we'll see again when we get to the Euthyphro this theme becomes manifest okay so again I hinted at this just a second ago but it's coming very clear that sought one of the claims that Socrates wants to make is that it's always better to suffer it injustice than to commit one and that would have been a very controversial claim and goes along with Socrates's earlier claim which I mentioned that you may think you're happy but in reality you might not really be so for instance take a person who has fame and wealth they're living at the top of the biggest hill in town and giant mansion everybody looks up to them can see them up there driving the big chariots having all of the women having all of the men having whatever they want money fame power and etc but if they committed immoral actions in order to achieve that status Socrates thought then they weren't truly happy and he often develops an analogy with health so there's an idea that a healthy body is one that's functioning appropriately one where all the parts are working in the way that they're supposed to be working and Socrates hints at a similar idea for the soul a healthy soul is one that's functioning in the right way one where all the parts are working in the right way and when you commit immoral actions you show evidence of a soul which is out of proportion in some way and so there's an analogy just like a person with a disfigured body can't live their best life if you're born with no arms and no legs you will be unable to live your best life not to say your life isn't worth living that's controversial but it should be obvious that you can't live the best possible life that you could have lived given a healthy human body so to a person with a disfigured soul according to Socrates can't live their best life because the more important part of them the soul is disfigured so it's always better to be the person who's committing the just act and it's always better to receive an injustice in fact Socrates makes the stronger claim that an unjust person can never harm a truly just person in fact that person would always be harming themselves because they are disfiguring their soul even if they take away the just person's life and that's a bit of foreshadowing so Socrates wants to claim that look even if you kill me you can't do me any harm because you're acting unjustly and so actually you're harming yourself by killing me you're actually harming yourself whereas for for Socrates who thinks the soul is immortal you're not doing him any harm at all he's lived according to his standards so this gives you a kind of portrait of a person who has very atypical views and who also is very smart and using reason to try to show that these views are correct okay so now before we actually talk about the Euthyphro and we're gonna go through the basic arguments of the Euthyphro as a way of illustrating all of these themes which I've been talking about so I want to give you some brief review of the story of the Socratic life of the life of Socrates so what I've been telling you so far about little snippets said here and there about his his philosophical views or his temperament but now I want to give you some idea of what actually happened over the course of his life so I've already mentioned some of the details but a little bit of his character will be useful to know so Socrates was notoriously not attractive he's described as having bug eyes and a snout nose sort of eyes looking off in either direction and sort of big lips so he was and of course in a Greek society much like our contemporary society they were very focused on physical beauty and though we know what they thought was beautiful because they left statues and pictures of the Greek gods and so they would have thought chiseled features and etc much standard similar to ours in many ways our current contemporary ones so Socrates did not meet those standards he was notoriously unattractive he was didn't hold a job he wouldn't take a shower he wore the same clothes to bed as he wore out on the street he spent all of his time in the market what was called Ghora and would talk to anybody who had passed by so remember the Sophists that we discussed in the earlier lectures Sophists were people who would only teach for money and people would try to offer money to Socrates to teach them and he would refuse money he would not be paid for engaging in philosophical discussion he wanted to find people and to figure out whether they really knew what they were talking about so often what he would do is he'd be in the marketplace he would overhear a conversation someone he would say well that's not just why would he act that way in Socrates would ask them whoa so you think you know what justice is well yeah I think I know what justice is well then tell me what justice is and so you would get into these kinds of conversations with anybody who happened to be around and Socrates was well known for being extremely intelligent although strange and his conversations would draw crowds often especially when the person he was talking to was well known and you would want to see this because there Socrates a dis he've old disheveled mess debating some important person and running circles around them ultimately getting this person to the point where they would have to admit in public in front of a bunch of people that they really no longer knew the answer to the question so if the question was what is justice Socrates would often argue the person until they got to the point where they said I don't know what justice is anymore and then Socrates thought ah now we can begin and what he would try to do is to draw out of the person the answer and so one of Socrates his favorite methods was to claim that he in fact did not know anything he would claim I don't know anything you say that you know something why don't you tell me what you know and then he would proceed to show them that they couldn't possibly mean that that it was wrong in this way in that way and then they would say well I don't know anymore and then Socrates would say ah well like a midwife now I can help you give birth to what you knew all along but was misguided by this and this is the theme again that Plato will develop that knowledge is somehow innate this is what's known as the doctrine of recollection that you're not really when you learn something you're not really acquiring some new information but remembering something that you already knew and there's a famous dialogue of Socrates where he takes an average person a slave boy and by slave you should really just think to yourself an uneducated person a servant someone who have never been taught geometry didn't know how to read or write and Socrates was able to show that if you ask the right questions the student would give the right answers which showed that he did understand geometry even though no one had really explained or taught it to him previously now this is supposed to illustrate this basic idea that we have this prior knowledge which somehow we're born with and that we're trying to do was unearth that by careful reflection now this becomes a very influential idea and we'll see Descartes take up this idea and Plato take up this idea so it's interesting that it starts here okay so here's Socrates saying that he doesn't know anything going around having these conversations with people trying to show them that they don't know anything either and then trying to build back up maybe we can develop some of this knowledge so very famously then the Oracle at Delphi which I've meet mentioned previously in their first lecture his issues a proclamation about Socrates someone goes and asks the Oracle who is the wisest person in Athens and the Oracle famously responds that it's Socrates but Socrates is the wisest person in Athens and this is supposed to be ironic because Socrates is famous for saying that he doesn't know anything so Socrates jokes maybe this is what the gods think of in the wisdom the one who doesn't know anything is yeah that's what you must but that's what humanism is they're not capable of it another sanity maybe this is this is an education of this but what I've been coming to through a philosophical or you think of as evidence you're the Oracle then please don't keep following this kind of knowledge Socrates likely takes a difference I mean maybe I should hash a test maybe I should take a test this and using use as a science or or maybe maybe it's not me don't know don't know but it usually loses this he'll his question my favorite resident rounds around him so when some thoughts invite us all to tell authorities won't respond because the or the Oracle has told me tonight unless unless I must go over however person receive whether or not I should abandon them and he's also Joseph or remark that even though he doesn't know anything he thinks that he's discovered pepper in the course of all of my discussions that's even though he doesn't know anything at least he has aware excuse me at least he is aware that he doesn't know anything whereas other people don't know anything and yet are under the impression that they do know something so in that sense Socrates is better off he is wiser because he knows that he does not know and that's sort of the official conclusion that Socrates comes to is that well these other people don't know that they don't know whereas I do know that I don't know so maybe that's what the Oracle meant but notice in the course of this investigation what Socrates has done is to go to all the most powerful and influential people in and around Athens and to have public debates with them and to show them in public that they don't know what they're talking about Socrates develops many enemies this way as you could imagine this is a time when before John Stewart it's the time before the Daily Show this is a time where public humiliation was taken very seriously and often interlocutors of Socrates were made to be filled were made to feel humiliated they felt like Socrates got the best of them somehow even though they weren't quite sure in which way so this made a lot of hard feelings and Socrates was brought up on charges the charges by wide agreement in the society were trumped-up they just sort of events the frustration that the culture had with this character so the charges officially were corrupting the youth and you can see why they might charge him with corrupting the youth Socrates is out in the marketplace arguing and there are children imitating him back at home so here comes little Anaximander and Anaximander comes running in and you say that's not polite what does Homer say and Anaximander responds by saying Socrates says Homer was an idiot and we should question what Homer said and how do you know that's right anyway and what do you mean by polite so you could imagine that the average person thought of this as pernicious as interference here's this dirty disheveled character this bum doesn't even hold a job spends all day asking these kinds of questions teaching the children to mimic him by asking these kinds of questions and so there was frustration with that and that's where the corrupting the youth charge comes from but there was also the charge of not believing in the gods of the state the Greek gods of Athena and Zeus and etc and this stems from an interesting side digression which I'll mention so Socrates was famous for having a damn own excuse me Socrates famously said that he had a dayum own which is a Greek word which later becomes our English word demon but in the Greek you had good day moans and bad day moans they were is sort of just a generic word for these kind of creatures and so later on in Christianity these become angels and demons so we could it could just as well be interpreted that Socrates had a guardian angel of some sort and that's the usual way that it's interpreted and the daym own was a little voice that he heard in his head which always told them when he ought not to perform some action so famously Socrates tells this story where he takes a certain route home every day and one day he's taking that walk home down the street down you know Zeus Lane and Athena Boulevard and he hears a voice in his head which says take a different way home today for no reason out of the he decides to take a different way home he discovers later that at that time on the normal street a herd of animals had escaped their pen and it stampeded down the street and it killed someone and Socrates himself would have been killed if not for the voice of the day among so that this is something he tells people that he hears his voice which tells him when he ought not to do something it's a kind of warning voice it never tells him to do anything so it's not as though he hears voices that say go argue with this person but rather he hears a voice which says don't do that so they charge him then with denying the gods of the state and invoking his own personal God this day I'm on so that these charges are kind of trumped up Socrates goes to trial on these charges and gives his defense and the defense is famously called the apology because of the Greek word apology means to defend so it means something different than what we mean in modern English by apology which is to apologize to say you're sorry and it means something very different so he goes to court and he offers his defence he questions his accuser she presents evidence he tells people not to confuse the actual socrates with his image as his reputation in the society that each person has a reputation which doesn't accurately reflect who they really are and that you shouldn't confuse the two he refuses to bring his children and wife in he has children he has a wife it was common in these proceedings to parade them in front of the court crying and lamenting please let him off please let him off Socrates says I won't do that now what he presents as his defense is some of these ideas we've been discussing he says look the unexamined life is not worth living you Athenian citizens whom I love so much you have been living unexamined lives you've been sleepwalking through life wake up Athenians he compares himself to a gadfly a gadfly is a kind of fly that lands on a horse and will bite it and the horse will then be goaded out of inaction so a horse is sort of lazily sitting in the Sun a gadfly comes and bites it on the ass in the horse zone starts trotting around being active Socrates compares himself to that he says you're like the lazy horse I'm like the gadfly I land on you I bite you in the ass I show you that you don't know anything and then I go Jew into action you become awake you start walking around and you start asking these questions for yourself now notice what he's doing here it's very interesting what he's saying is that his defense is that he's done something for the Athenian citizens he's woken them up so his defense is look I did you a favor well this angers a lot of people and so we won't go into the details but he loses the trial and it's by a relatively close margin they had hundreds of jurors back then not 12 like in our day so he loses by a very narrow vote I don't know the exact numbers but if I but if I recall correctly it's less than a hundred votes or something I think it's like 80 hi I'm not sure I won't actually commit myself to saying I should know this but I don't so he loses by a very close margin so he is convicted of corrupting the youth and believing in God's not of the state and then the second phase of the trial begins whereby they consider sentencing so they consider various sentences and really what again what they want is for him to stop acting this way and he's very defining he says he won't quit so they say look if you're in he says I can't stop doing this and as a will see as an instance of this in fact he really probably can't stop doing this because even as he's on his way into the court house that's where he meets Euthyphro he stops to have a lengthy conversation with you so fro before he goes into the courthouse to defend himself so that's kind of analogous to committing the crime you're being charged with on the steps of the court before you go to defend yourself for committing that crime he's out there doing the very thing he's in trouble for minutes before standing trial so this is a portrait of a person who's not going to stop who sees it as part of their duty to continue doing what they're doing so then their second suggestion is hey maybe do it somewhere else right let's just exile you you can move to Sparta you can move Alexandria you just get out of here leave us alone Socrates says that that's not acceptable and the reason is that he's an Athenian he's lived there his whole life he's not going to be exiled he's old now where's he going to go and besides which if he goes somewhere else he's going to keep doing what he's doing and then what they're going to get sick of him and put him on trial nope he's going to take his chances here in his home so now that's very frustrating here Socrates saying you know that that's not acceptable to me I won't leave I know I've been convicted but that's not going to happen so they ask him what do you Socrates think should be your punishment and it's very interesting what he says next in the Greek society being a champion of the Olympics was about the highest honor you could have in the society there were the gods there were the Olympic champions and then there were the rest of us down here who could eke out a living one way or another now Olympic champions were treated a certain way in the society as the pinnacle of the society they were treated to carte blanche in the city they didn't have to pay for food for rent everything was given to them and in fact it was an honor to have the Olympic champion driving your chariot as opposed to you know Archimedes vs chariots down the street you want them driving your chariots so these champions were lauded and were considered the pinnacle of Greek society and culture and were never made to pay for anything again it could just spend their days as they saw fit and when Socrates is asked what his punishment should be he says that you should treat me like a champion I mean he wasn't good at sports but rather you should treat him that way he was arguing you should you should reverse your priorities instead of putting on the pedestal these champions of physical beauty who don't have much mental going on you should rather prize those who are interested in critical self-reflection and really understanding what's going on with themselves and other people as the height of society and this just angers people to no end they go away to vote on one is punishment income B and they come back and it's overwhelmingly it's no longer close it's overwhelmingly he loses and they sentence him to death now of course no one really wants to kill Socrates everyone is hoping that he will escape in the middle of the night and so they set the execution for when the ship comes in at a certain time and they send him to a cell in prison to await he goes there he has the discussion which I mentioned previously about the nature of the soul and whether you survive your death his friends all pull in they come to him they say Socrates we've got money your family is worried about you your wife your kids we can pay the guard he was looking the other way he's lost his toga clip over in the corner there and he's going to be looking for the toga clip for the next four hours it's very difficult to find we have a boat waiting in the harbor we can get you past the guard let's get out of here before they kill you and Socrates gives a very famous argument that he can't leave the cell because it would be to commit an injustice against the city against the laws he imagines this personification of the laws of Athens saying hey Socrates you followed us your whole life and always have been content to live by the laws of Athens and now when it doesn't go your ways you're going to do as violence just because it didn't work out the way you wanted it to you're bound by the law you're bound by the social contract and that's a very famous argument that civil disobedience is wrong and not everyone has agreed with Socrates there in fact Aristotle famously later on when he gets into trouble with the Athenian courts he leaves town and they send them a letter saying hey Aristotle come back and stand trial and Aristotle responds back to them I won't come back and let you sin again philosophy twice so not everybody agreed that they should just because the law say do this that means you should do it Socrates does because he thinks if we only choose to obey laws when they're in our favor then the fabric of society is going to be in trouble that's again a very interesting argument but we won't dwell on it so he doesn't leave he stays in prison the boat comes in they bring him the fatal hemlock which is how they execute people in this day he drinks the poison he stands up he walks around until he starts feeling cold he lays down and his parting word is to make sure to sacrifice a rooster to the goddess clip yes because he's being healed and he dies now this is a very moving portrait of a person who profoundly believed in the things that they were saying so here's socrates who's lived his whole life according to a certain set of principles and no matter what you think of the way he acted or the way he's described as acting here he's not going to give up everything he's believed in his whole life at the last minute and so here's a kind of portrait of a person who's fiercely passionate about what they think think that they have the right answer follows the argument to its conclusion and also has the courage of their convictions and lives according to that worldview all right so that's a little bit of the to give you some context of the discussion with Euthyphro so Euthyphro is a priest who is coming out of the courthouse as socrates is walking into it so you recall I just mentioned that Socrates was about to stand trial for his life as it turns out and he sees Euthyphro coming out Euthyphro says oh hey Socrates what are you doing over here at Socrates again a Euthyphro what's going on with you why are you at the courthouse and he's like I'm going in there stand trial and you're pretty famous for knowing about what piety is so if you're going to tell me what it is then that would be a great advantage because they're accusing me of being in pious now Euthyphro takes the bait and sets himself up for a big fall by claiming socrates if there is one thing which distinguishes Euthyphro from all other men it is his Euthyphro 'he's assured knowledge in such matters so Euthyphro is saying to socrates look i know a piety is and i'm willing to tell you what it is so Socrates engaging in this kind of discussion so what then is piety well the first thing that Euthyphro says is look piety is doing what I'm doing well what is he doing it turns out that Euthyphro is at the court to report his father for murder and that's supposed to be a very dramatic and surprising consequence to us ancient Greek people who this story is being told to since ancient Greece was very patriarchal and the head of the household was not someone who you reported on charges especially as the son the duty of the son was to obey the parent even more controversial the person whom Euthyphro his father was alleged to have murdered was a slave and in fact the circumstances are very bizarre so here's the story that youth of row tells there are these two servants who get drunk and get into a fight with each other one of the servants murders the other servant so there's Euthyphro dad who's got this drunks servant who's murdered the other servant so he doesn't know what to do with this drunk crazy servant so he ties him up and throws him in a ditch in the back of the property and send someone into the town to get the local authorities now of course this is a long time ago and takes a while to get into the town and get back and by the time that this other servant gets back with the proper authorities the slave has been tied up overnight in a ditch and is died from exposure so it's froze to death and no longer living now Euthyphro then goes to court to file charges against his father for the murder of the slave the murder being that he left him out overnight so Socrates again says oh gee you must really know what piety is because nobody's going to go to charge their father with murder so you must really know Euthyphro says yeah I really do know so once he finds that out Socrates says well you know that's not really what I'm talking about because what it what I'm interested in is a definition of what piety is rather than an example so a definition is a peculiar kind of thing for Socrates a definition is a specification of what it is about the thing you're interested in which is essential to it where that's typically a question of what property distinguishes it from other things and in virtue of which having it is the reason for it being that kind of object so what definition is what all the examples have in common and also the further claim that having that thing is responsible for them being the kinds of things they are so for instance this is again continuing with our theme something which is very easy to do in geometry so here's a bunch of if somebody asked you what a triangle was and you drew these kinds of three pictures the three kinds of triangles well that wouldn't really be to explain what a triangle is that would be giving examples of triangles this is a triangle that's a triangle there must be some thing which all of those examples have which is the reason that you're saying they're triangles it's what makes them examples of being a triangle and in fact that's very easy to give in the case of being a triangle it's being a three-sided figure whose interior angles add up to 180 degrees a classical Euclidian triangle so we can say what it is every triangle has that property known on triangles have it and that's the thing which all triangles have in common which is responsible for them being triangles now notice that second part is important because if you look at these triangles you might say well look what I'll try having in common is that they're blue here's three blue triangles they all have that in common they're all displayed on this screen in front of me right now but of course even though the triangles have that in common that's an accident that's not what it is which makes them triangles so when Socrates is talking about piety what it means to be pious what it wants is something like this what is it that every single pious action shares and which is responsible for those actions being pious now Euthyphro is a smart guy he's I see exactly what you mean well really so you want to know says Euthyphro why it is that what I'm doing is pious rather than to say this is an example you want the attribute which makes it that way well here it is being pious is being loved by all the gods and Euthyphro actually tells a story which is supposed to justify this in fact his justification is that Zeus the father of all the gods kills his own father so if you know about this Greek mythology Zeus has to kill his own parents in order to take the throne and be the king of all the gods and so Euthyphro says you see Zeus approves of going against one's father but of course there's a problem and here again we see Socrates using this methodology of identifying a contradiction so what's the contradiction well there are many gods and some approve and others don't so suppose that Zeus loves action a and a thing that hates it well then if being loved by the Gods is what makes something pious then this action is both pious and impious so that shows that it can't be the right theory it's got to be something else and we can notice again this pattern namely that what's going on here is we identify opposite properties being instantiated by this action and that's supposed to tell us that the original definition can't possibly be right AHA Euthyphro says well all right then let's stipulate the pot the really pious actions are what are loved by all the gods and of course in once you get past polytheism and turn to monotheism then you can just say love by the God so that's fantastic and in the modern times this is translated into something which is known as the divine command theory so if we switch from talking about piety and impiety and start talking about just in general what makes something right or wrong good or bad then the the divine command theory says that the things that are good or right are that way because God loves or commands those things so telling the truth is good because God commanded us to tell the truth lying is bad because god forbids us to lie one of the commandments do not bear false witness now Socrates objects that this way of thinking about moral properties can't be right and this is the beginning of his argument that there are objective moral properties which are not merely relative and the basic idea is that we can't simply say that what is right is what God loves because we haven't said why God loves that thing and there are two different ways of understanding that which leads to what is known as the Euthyphro question simply because it's the question that Socrates asks Euthyphro at this point in the dialogue so the question then is look take any commandment of God say God says tell the truth does God command us to tell the truth because telling the truth is good or is it the case that telling the truth is good because God commands it and these two versions horns of the dilemma are both at odds with our ordinary way of thinking about morality according to Socrates now then you can see then what Socrates point is this isn't the way we think of the loving relationship in common sense so think about my lack of chocolate ice cream so chocolate ice cream tastes good now why does it taste good does it taste good because I like it or is it that in other words so is it the fact that I like it the reason that it tastes good or is it rather that I taste it and then just like the taste that I have so that I like it because of the way that it is already in Socrates thinks that this is the way we normally talk about love that you love something because of the way it is already in particular for instance it's creamy it's sweet it's got a little bitterness to it and etc so the reason that I say that it's good is because of the way that thing is already and this seems to push us towards one of these answers so if we think about this the way that loving works the object is a way already and we like that stuff about it and that's what makes us say that it's good now if we take that view then we deny that it's good because God commands it so if God looks at the world and says I'll look there's telling the truth I like that because telling the truth is good in and of itself well then you've denied that the divine command theory is true but on the other hand if you really want to assert that it's not like that then instead it's simply whatever God likes becomes good in virtue of his merely liking or loving it or commanding it then Socrates wants to argue that morality is completely arbitrary so this is usually brought out by asking questions about hey look you know what if God came back and said I command you to rape as much as possible I command you to murder the innocent well if you really accept the divine command theory there is no reason to expect that God wouldn't command such a thing for instance you can't say oh but it's wrong because whatever he commands is right and in fact there are some stories in some accounts in the Bible which seem to support this way of thinking but it certainly is at odds with our ordinary way thinking about morality some people want to claim that look even if God commanded that we ought to rape as much as possible it wouldn't make it right because there's something about raping which is just intrinsically wrong so it seems like there's a real problem here now of course one common response that people give is look God wouldn't command such things we don't have to worry about that because God wouldn't ever say oh you know you should rape but if you really think that it's got to be because God's a perfect judge of these things and he sees what's really wrong about rape so he commands us to do that thing but notice if you say that you've already given up on the idea that it's God's commands which make it the case that rape is wrong it's rather that he sort of looks out into the world says Oh raping is terrible it's a violation of autonomy commands us not to do it and it's this other principle the violation of autonomy the causing of despair etc which is doing the work of justifying the moral claim so what Socrates is arguing here is that there's a distinction to be made between the commands of God on the one hand and the things which are moral on the other hand it seems as though more moral properties or intrinsic properties which don't depend on the relations to the love of God or to the other people to society they're they are what they are because of the way that they are and not because of their relations to other things and this seems to preclude that they are merely that way because of a relationship to the commandment of God so here we have one of the first arguments that is explicitly given that when it comes to moral properties we don't need to depend on divide revelation now if God commands us to do various things we can accept those as tracking what's real because God is a perfect judge with perfect rationality who wouldn't want to mislead us and so we can accept that murder is wrong and that and that telling the truth is morally good but what Socrates is arguing is that knowing that God doesn't like it doesn't answer the full question yet because we still want to know why doesn't God like it what is the reason what's the ultimate source of the justification for saying that rape is wrong and that telling the truth is good now notice this is just again putting him in line with these earlier pre-socratics here again we see someone who thinks that we can use reason to discover the way things are in the moral realm and that we don't need to divine we don't need to rely on divine revelation as our only source of knowledge about what's real in the realm of morality and in fact that morality must depend on something further something outside of the will of God now so then this summing up or coming to the end of this lecture and I know it's gone on a bit longer than usual but these are important topics so where Socrates concludes then is that what he calls goodness is an intrinsic property that some actions or persons possess and the virtuous person a good person is one who knows what that is in other words they're able to look out into the world and see which actions exhibit this property which persons exhibit it and knowing goodness is simply amounting to knowing what it is that all good things have in common and is responsible for their being good to achieve that task is the most important goal of human life and that's where this idea of critical self-reflection what Socrates says calls know thyself for the unexamined life as we discussed previously in order to do that we need to engage in dialogue with other people to help uncover these things which are innate in us discovering these truths via the use of reason so that's a kind of summary of what the historical Socrates is thought to have held and of course there are many more details that we could go into

Channel: Richard Brown

Views: 56,646

Rating: 4.7442923 out of 5

Keywords: socrates, philosophy, socratic turn, Euthyphro

Id: -P479eHV8bo

Length: 73min 4sec (4384 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2011