Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Socrates... what a shit head
after spending the entire class period reading the part of Socrates from Platos' dialectic, not only do i feel drunk off redundancy, i've been enlightened as to what an ass hole he was. i know i touched on this at the end of class, but good lord, what an ass hole. that entire conversation was spent on making this euthyphro look like a total moron for not being able to answer questions that have no answers! he talked this guy into circles for, what seemed, no other reason than self vindication. some ego on this prick! now, i'm not saying euthyphro didn't throw himself into the situation. He probably even deserved what he got. but socrates is hailed as one of the greatest thinkers in history! For my money, he's no better than a kid who tortures a bug to death after tearing off its' wings.
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That's part of the reason he was executed, or so some say. But notice, too, that he was quite an old man when he was finally sentenced, and had spent much of his life as an asshole.
He may indeed have been a pain: in the dialogue "Meno", Anytus warns him that he should not offend people so frequently, or the consequences might be dire. Still, he felt that being a "gadfly" was his mission, and if that meant offending those easily offended, oh well.
So, what is important about him as a philosopher? Chiefly that he forced people to examine their assumptions, mostly about the meanings of words, but through this to the things, actions, or ideas to which those words refer. He showed that people like Euthyphro were pretty much prejudicial fools, who really had no solid notion of what they were talking about -- but that they were able to "fool most of the people most of the time". If he made them look like fools, well, again, that's only what they had been doing to others with their lack of clear thinking.
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