I went not long ago to a viewing of TOGETHER, a supernatural body-horror movie with, I was told, a philosophical angle. It stars Alison Brie, best known as the voice of Diane in BoJack Horseman and as Annie in the sitcom Community. TOGETHER does have a philosophical angle, and I admire Brie, but I cannot recommend this movie. SPOILER ALERT. Do not read further if you want the plot twists to surprise you. The plot plays out at two sites: one a rather generic US "big city," the other a much more bucolic environment at least an hour by car or train ride away. The screenplay offers few specifics about these locations (and the principal photography, I'm told, was done in Australia) but from what specifics we do get the story begins on the US west coast -- let us say Seattle -- and the bucolic scenes are well inland. The central couple are Tim and Millie, played by Dave Franco and Brie. Their relationship has fallen on a bad patch -- they are not sure whe...
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I regaled you last week with a couple of simple points from a book written in the early 200s of the Common Era, Diogenes Laertius' LIVES AND OPINIONS. The two points were these: Socrates was taught by a philosopher named Archelaus, who was a philosopher of nature in the manner of the Ionians. Separately, Socrates may have been a dramatist, who assisted in writing some of the works normally attributed to Euripides. If accepted as true (I don't think they are -- I have read a fair amount of discussion of Socrates without encountering ether of them) -- but IF accepted as true, do they change our understanding of the Athenian Enlightenment in any important way? Well ... perhaps. One of the bromides of Socrates scholarship is that before his time philosophy was about Nature writ large, the essence of the Cosmos. (Is everything water? is it air? fire? atoms? something else?). Through Socrates, philosophy came to encompass also a microcosm, the human soul and its virtues and vices. ...
This was my answer to the question whether Plato's account of Socrates can be relied upon: Plato’s account [or accounts] of Socrates has [have] to be considered in connection with other evidence, especially in my view the comedy THE CLOUDS, written by Aristophanes during Socrates’ lifetime. That is the TL;DR answer. For more, bear with me. Aristophanes portrays Socrates as a sophist, and in fact as the leader of the sophists. And he portrays sophism in general as what we might call a cult, the purpose of which is to make bad arguments seem good, and good arguments seem bad. Now this is odd on its face. Plato after all portrays Socrates as an anti-sophist. In PROTAGORAS especially, and even in the early going of THE REPUBLIC (the exchange with Thrasymachus), the Platonic Socrates devotes himself largely to showing the sophists — or to showing impressionable youngsters — the errors and arrogance of sophism. And Plato’s Socrates seems to object to s...
"If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses’ madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.” Plato, Phaedrus 245a. I saw that in a FB group, and the poster asks for our takes on what Plato is saying here. I don't think there's any exegetical mystery to be unwound here. As Plato goes, the meaning seems pretty clear. But I replied, beginning with a question of my own. "Have you seen the movie AMADEUS? It is making the same point. The world is full of talented mediocrities in music and in literature. If they can earn an honest living at their talent they are surely entitled to it. But when an Aristophanes comes along (or a Mozart) he reaches another domain entirely. That of genius." To be clear, the analogy I am suggesting is that Mozart is to Salieri as Aristophanes is...
Henry brought up a good point in the comment section of a post a couple of weeks ago. What do we know about the historical Socrates? Should he even be included on "greatest philosophers" lists independent of Plato? As I said in a responsive comment at the time, we know there WAS a historical Socrates, that he wasn't simply a figment of Plato's imagination serving as mouthpiece. The other sources include: Xenophon, another of Socrates' students, who wrote his own account of Socrates' trial and condemnation; Aristophanes, the playwright who wrote a comedy with Socrates as its comic butt; and Aristotle, who referenced Socrates in ways that suggest that he was writing for an audience that still remembered the guy. From all of this, scholars have tried to tease out what was S., what was merely the mouthpiece for P. of the same name. The case of the Aristophanes/Socrates/Plato triangle fascinates me. If one reads THE CLOUDS, one gets a vivid picture of wh...