Wednesday, August 30th

• Today:
• Plato’s Apology

• For next Wednesday:

• Read Plato’s Symposium
 Plato’s Apology
• 399 B.C.E.: Socrates addresses the court

• 1st accusation:
• “Socrates commits injustice and is a busybody, in that he investigates the
things beneath the earth and in the heavens, makes the weaker argument the
stronger, and teaches these things to others.”

• 2nd accusation:
• “Socrates is guilty of corrupting the young, and of not acknowledging the
gods the city acknowledges, but new daimonic activities instead.”
 Socrates tells his story
• The oracle at Delphi: no one is wiser than Socrates

• Socrates investigates the riddle:

1. Politicians
2. Poets
3. Craftsmen

• Socratic wisdom:
• “I’m wiser than that person. For it’s likely that neither of us knows anything fine and
good, but he thinks he knows something he doesn’t know, whereas I, since I don’t in
fact know, don’t think that I do either. At any rate, it seems that I’m wiser than he in
just this one small way: that what I don’t know I don’t think I know.”
 Socrates tells his story
• “Why, then, you may ask, do some people enjoy spending so much
time with me? … because they enjoy listening to people being
examined who think they are wise but they aren’t.”

• The people being examined often dislike this!

• “Yet, so as not to appear at a loss, they utter the stock phrases used against all
who philosophize: “things in the sky and beneath the earth” and “not
acknowledging the gods” and “making the weaker argument the stronger.””
 Socrates on virtue
• “You’re not thinking straight, sir, if you think that a man who’s any use
at all should give any opposing weight to the risk of living or dying,
instead of looking to this alone whenever he does anything: whether
his actions are just or unjust, the deeds of a good or bad man.”

• “My excellent man, you’re an Athenian, you belong the greatest city,
renowned for its wisdom and strength; are you not ashamed that you
take care to acquire as much wealth as possible—and reputation and
honor—but that about wisdom and truth, about how your soul may
be in the best possible condition, you take neither care nor thought?”
 Socrates on Death
• “Fearing death, gentlemen, is nothing other than thinking one is wise
when one isn’t, since it’s thinking one knows what one doesn’t know.”

Socrates’s argument
1. Being dead is either a) nothingness or b) “a migration of the soul
from here to another place.”
2. If a), then death is like a dreamless sleep: not so bad!
3. If b), that actually sounds great: I could philosophize with the dead!
4. Either way, death isn’t so bad!
 Two counterintuitive doctrines
• No one ever knowingly acts wrongly
• Socrates famously denied the existence of akrasia (weakness of will)
• “No one who either knows or believes that there is another possible course of
action, better than the one he is following, will ever continue on his present
course” -Socrates, in Plato’s Protagoras

• “Nothing bad can happen to a good man, whether in life or death.”

• We will see this idea developed later in Stoicism
 The rest of the story
• Crito:
• In prison, Socrates’s friends try to persuade him to escape.
• Socrates refuses: “the most important thing is not living, but living well.”

• Phaedo:
• Just before drinking hemlock, Socrates talks with his friends.
• He makes lengthy arguments for the immortality of the soul.
• Socrates calmly drinks the poison, rebukes his friends for crying, and dies
peacefully.
 For next Wednesday
• Read Plato’s Symposium (selection in textbook)