Open Socrates - Revision history

Robert.adlington: /* 11. Death */

2026-05-09T10:42:25Z

11. Death

@@ Line 301: / Line 301: @@
 * I have come to see less and less ironic distance or detachment between Socrates and his interlocutors. Increasingly, Socrates seems to be putting all his cards on the table, and this strikes me as an act of great friendliness, openness, and humanity. Where I once saw Socratic irony, I now see Socratic love.
 === 11. Death ===
-* Bulleted list item
+* Socrates: "We should not become misologues (ie, haters of reason), as people become misanthropes. There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.

Robert.adlington: /* 10. Love */

2026-05-08T09:41:14Z

10. Love

← Older revision		Revision as of 09:41, 8 May 2026
Line 270:		Line 270:
	* The moralist tells you to strive to be on par with everyone else, whereas the anti-moralist tells you to strive for elevated status.		* The moralist tells you to strive to be on par with everyone else, whereas the anti-moralist tells you to strive for elevated status.
	* Human interactions are replete with status-seeking behavior.		* Human interactions are replete with status-seeking behavior.
			* Mike Tyson and AJ Ayer.
	* A person wants to be recognized by someone whose recognition she, in turn, recognizes; she wants to be standing on the same plane as that person, and to have that plan be, in some, elevated. Elevated does not mean elevated over the person she's talking to; and nor does it necessarily mean at the absolute top.		* A person wants to be recognized by someone whose recognition she, in turn, recognizes; she wants to be standing on the same plane as that person, and to have that plan be, in some, elevated. Elevated does not mean elevated over the person she's talking to; and nor does it necessarily mean at the absolute top.
	* Equality is a value in the service of which we are willing to die.		* Equality is a value in the service of which we are willing to die.
Line 288:		Line 289:
	* To engage with a point of view that conflicts with your own, but to continue to engage with it as a point of view on the truth - that is what it is to recognize someone as your equal.		* To engage with a point of view that conflicts with your own, but to continue to engage with it as a point of view on the truth - that is what it is to recognize someone as your equal.
	* Praise for intelligence or intellectual ability touches us so deeply because it speaks to our most fundamental wish: to be treated not as a physical thing, not as a social thing, but as an intellectual thing. The ultimate form of respect is being seen in terms of one's power to help others figure out how to live.		* Praise for intelligence or intellectual ability touches us so deeply because it speaks to our most fundamental wish: to be treated not as a physical thing, not as a social thing, but as an intellectual thing. The ultimate form of respect is being seen in terms of one's power to help others figure out how to live.
	=== 10. Love ===		=== 10. Love (and Irony) ===
	* ~~Bulleted list item~~		* Socrates says "love is wanting to possess the good forever."
			* In Socrates' picture, other people are not for fusing with. Other people allow the restlessness of love to drive us upward.
			* Socratic irony: "His whole life is one big games - a game of irony."
			* Before and during Socrates' life, irony was a term of opprobrium, but eventually it becomes a term of admiration and approval. Vlastos argues that it was Socrates to whom we today own the positive conception or iron. He says it is Socrates' major cultural contribution to the sensibility of western Europe.
			* For Vlastos, Socrates instantiates a good (complex) kind of dissimulation. From Hegel onward, many philosophers have carried forward this supposedly Socratic legacy of positive irony - there is a good way of not saying what you mean.
			* But what is supposedly deceptively concealed from Thrasymachus (the participant) is the very same thing that is supposedly elegantly conveyed to Cicero (the observer).
			* When it comes to catastrophe, we waver, depending on our level of personal involvement. The same is true of Socratic irony, and the two poles we waver between - involvement and uninvolvement - are alive and well today.
			* The theory of Socratic irony is the theory that Socrates is not someone you can be. You can only play Socrates.
			* But Socratic irony is what Socratic intimacy looks like to those who can't believe in it.
			* I have come to see less and less ironic distance or detachment between Socrates and his interlocutors. Increasingly, Socrates seems to be putting all his cards on the table, and this strikes me as an act of great friendliness, openness, and humanity. Where I once saw Socratic irony, I now see Socratic love.
	=== 11. Death ===		=== 11. Death ===
	* Bulleted list item		* Bulleted list item

Robert.adlington: /* 9. Politics: Equality */

2026-05-08T09:26:58Z

9. Politics: Equality

@@ Line 268: / Line 268: @@
 * To say that human beings are social picks out the fact that a normal human life is a life spent with other humans; to say that we are political means that we live together under a shared idea of how to do so.
 === 9. Politics: Equality ===
-* Bulleted list item
+* The moralist tells  you  to strive to be on par with everyone else, whereas the anti-moralist tells you to strive for elevated status.
 === 10. Love ===
 * Bulleted list item
 === 11. Death ===
 * Bulleted list item

Robert.adlington: /* Part Three: Socratic Answers */

2026-05-06T15:30:39Z

Part Three: Socratic Answers

← Older revision		Revision as of 15:30, 6 May 2026
Line 260:		Line 260:

	== Part Three: Socratic Answers ==		== Part Three: Socratic Answers ==
	* ~~Bulleted list item~~		* Somehow the trademark ignorance of the philosopher itself amounts to expertise in the domains of love and death and politics.
			* You Socratize something when you show that it must be understood in the light of something else, something of which it is the imitation.
			* In general, the Socratizing move takes the form "A is the real B". For example, "Understanding is the real tattoo." With this move, Socrates scrapes the dust and cobwebs off of an ordinary or everyday concept and reveals it to be something higher, more transcendent, more demanding, and often more real than we had thought.
			* Socrates unified domains as distinct as love, death, and politics not be analyzing them in terms of some underlying common denominator, but rather by seeing them as converging upward toward a single aspiration: inquiry into untimely questions.
			* He is making the radical claim that, for ignorant people like us, human goodness is primarily expressed in how a person conducts herself in inquiry, and that conversation is where we find our true home. This amounts to the Socratization of the whole of life.
	=== 8. Politics: Justice and Liberty ===		=== 8. Politics: Justice and Liberty ===
	* ~~Bulleted list item~~		* To say that human beings are social picks out the fact that a normal human life is a life spent with other humans; to say that we are political means that we live together under a shared idea of how to do so.
	=== 9. Politics: Equality ===		=== 9. Politics: Equality ===
	* Bulleted list item		* Bulleted list item

Robert.adlington: /* 7. Meno's Paradox */

2026-05-05T20:12:31Z

7. Meno's Paradox

@@ Line 243: / Line 243: @@
 * Once the project of saying what Alcibiades thinks is distributed over two people, "p, but I don't believe it" becomes both sayable and thinkable. Socrates discovered that the space of speech is more capacious that the space of thought. It allows a person to see their own mistakes.
 === 7. Meno's Paradox ===
-* Bulleted list item
+* We are not sure what we mean by "think". Forget about machines. When do I myself count as thinking? Do nonhuman animals think? What is thinking? If we cannot answer these questions, we seem very far from bring able to say what it would be for a machine to think.
 == Part Three: Socratic Answers ==

Robert.adlington: /* 6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge */

2026-05-05T16:25:27Z

6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge

@@ Line 225: / Line 225: @@
 *Socrates tells us that our minds are not as powerful as we thought they were. When we shelter from the demands and pressures of the outside world and quietly engage in an activity we call "thinking to ourselves", that is not in fact when thinking happens. Thinking happens during the uncomfortable times when you permit others to intrude into your private mental world, to correct you.
 === 6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge ===
-* Bulleted list item
+* Error does not tend to survive introspective awareness of itself; when you catch your mind in going astray, at that very moment your mind cleans up its act.
 === 7. Meno's Paradox ===
 * Bulleted list item

Robert.adlington: /* Part Two: The Socratic Method */

2026-05-03T14:00:31Z

Part Two: The Socratic Method

@@ Line 193: / Line 193: @@
 == Part Two: The Socratic Method ==
-* Bulleted list item
+* Each of the three ingredients of Socratism, open-mindedness, inquiry, and separating truth from falsity - conceals a paradox.
 === 5. The Gadfly-Midwife Paradox ===
-* Bulleted list item
+* Kleist: "I want you to speak with the reasonable purpose of enlightening yourself."
 === 6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge ===
 * Bulleted list item

Robert.adlington: /* 4. Socratic Intellectualism */

2026-05-03T11:06:29Z

4. Socratic Intellectualism

@@ Line 133: / Line 133: @@
 === 4. Socratic Intellectualism ===
-* Bulleted list item
+* The demands of one's body to escape wounds or death can stand in tension with the bonds of solidarity to behave admirably or justly in rescuing friends and relatives.
 == Part Two: The Socratic Method ==

Robert.adlington: /* 3. Savage Commands */

2026-05-02T14:31:11Z

3. Savage Commands

@@ Line 102: / Line 102: @@
 * You're saying that you have some kind of a grip on how you should be acting, but what's actually happening is that you're wavering, because you can't keep that grip for more than fifteen minutes at a time. You waver in how you act and then you waver in how you talk about how you didn't waver when you acted. You can't eve stabilize your sentences for more than a few seconds at a time!
 * We've allowed our talk to waver in this way, just because the phenomenon is so common and normal and natural that we can't believe it could be a sign that something is going deeply wrong. But it is. Our problems talking about what is happening reflect a problem in the happening itself. There's a crack at the foundation of human motivation, but we've looked at it so many times that we've convinced ourselves that it is part of the design. In fact there are two cracks: Revenge and
 === 4. Socratic Intellectualism ===

Robert.adlington: /* 3. Savage Commands */

2026-05-02T12:54:03Z

3. Savage Commands

@@ Line 74: / Line 74: @@
 * The load-bearing answers we give to untimely questions are both the sources of our problems and the sources of all our reasons to care that we have problems.
 === 3. Savage Commands ===
-* Bulleted list item
+* All around you, the air is thick with commands. You can't escape them. They follow you wherever you go. You don't see them: they're invisible. You can't hear them they're inaudible. You feel them. The feeling is pain, accompanied by the prospect of pleasure.
 === 4. Socratic Intellectualism ===
 * Bulleted list item