#socrates — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #socrates, aggregated by home.social.
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From answer engines to learning engines — Why fast answers are like fast food
People crave fast answers. But the purpose of information systems is to help people gain knowledge. So we should seek better questions. -
From answer engines to learning engines — Why fast answers are like fast food
People crave fast answers. But the purpose of information systems is to help people gain knowledge. So we should seek better questions. -
From answer engines to learning engines — Why fast answers are like fast food
People crave fast answers. But the purpose of information systems is to help people gain knowledge. So we should seek better questions. -
From answer engines to learning engines — Why fast answers are like fast food
People crave fast answers. But the purpose of information systems is to help people gain knowledge. So we should seek better questions. -
From answer engines to learning engines — Why fast answers are like fast food
People crave fast answers. But the purpose of information systems is to help people gain knowledge. So we should seek better questions. -
Socrates learned the stonemasonry trade from his father and worked as a mason, too, as he didn’t have enough money to be a philosopher full time.
10 things you didn't know about Socrates.
https://topicaltens.blogspot.com/2026/05/20-may-socrates.html
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Thinking in Dialogues
Socratic dialogue, also known as the Socratic method, is a way of gaining knowledge through questions and answers. What does art have to say about this? -
Thinking in Dialogues
Socratic dialogue, also known as the Socratic method, is a way of gaining knowledge through questions and answers. What does art have to say about this? -
Thinking in Dialogues
Socratic dialogue, also known as the Socratic method, is a way of gaining knowledge through questions and answers. What does art have to say about this? -
Thinking in Dialogues
Socratic dialogue, also known as the Socratic method, is a way of gaining knowledge through questions and answers. What does art have to say about this? -
Thinking in Dialogues
Socratic dialogue, also known as the Socratic method, is a way of gaining knowledge through questions and answers. What does art have to say about this? -
#ALCIBIADES #BEING #TAUGHT BY #SOCRATES aepiot.com?q=ALCIBIADES... LA #GRANDE #VOILE #THE #BIG #SAIL aepiot.com?q=LA%20GRAND... 1976 #BIRTHDAY #HONOURS aepiot.ro?q=1976%20BIR... aéPiot - MultiSearch Tag Explorer: headlines-world.com
MultiSearch Tag Explorer -
#ALCIBIADES #BEING #TAUGHT BY #SOCRATES aepiot.com?q=ALCIBIADES... LA #GRANDE #VOILE #THE #BIG #SAIL aepiot.com?q=LA%20GRAND... 1976 #BIRTHDAY #HONOURS aepiot.ro?q=1976%20BIR... aéPiot - MultiSearch Tag Explorer: headlines-world.com
MultiSearch Tag Explorer -
we should do as Ancient Athens did:
the poor pay nothing
low middle pay little
higher middle pay more
rich have to give all above a limit -
we should do as Ancient Athens did:
the poor pay nothing
low middle pay little
higher middle pay more
rich have to give all above a limit -
📰 Today's top stories, personally curated for you by Zorz Studios: http://zorz.it/newspaper
- #CoastalWedding in cream and #champagne with a colorful reception twist;
- #CanonR6V vs. #R6MarkIII: which one should you actually buy?
- #YouTube #tools that scale attention;
- The Flint and Tinder #HighSummerInHillCountry collection;
- The most influential #philosophers explained in 26 minutes: from #Socrates to #Wittgenstein, and more -
📰 Today's top stories, personally curated for you by Zorz Studios: http://zorz.it/newspaper
- #CoastalWedding in cream and #champagne with a colorful reception twist;
- #CanonR6V vs. #R6MarkIII: which one should you actually buy?
- #YouTube #tools that scale attention;
- The Flint and Tinder #HighSummerInHillCountry collection;
- The most influential #philosophers explained in 26 minutes: from #Socrates to #Wittgenstein, and more -
📰 Today's top stories, personally curated for you by Zorz Studios: http://zorz.it/newspaper
- #CoastalWedding in cream and #champagne with a colorful reception twist;
- #CanonR6V vs. #R6MarkIII: which one should you actually buy?
- #YouTube #tools that scale attention;
- The Flint and Tinder #HighSummerInHillCountry collection;
- The most influential #philosophers explained in 26 minutes: from #Socrates to #Wittgenstein, and more -
#SOCRATES #SATELLITE search.brave.com/ask?q=Analyz... Semantic NODES: The Bridge between Humans and Artificial Intelligence. NOSTR.com - Jumble: jumble.social/users/npub1j...
Brave Search -
#SOCRATES #SATELLITE search.brave.com/ask?q=Analyz... Semantic NODES: The Bridge between Humans and Artificial Intelligence. NOSTR.com - Jumble: jumble.social/users/npub1j...
Brave Search -
Oh, am 6. Juni ist wieder SoCraTes Day Franken. Wer kommt denn da noch vorbei?
https://www.meetup.com/softwerkskammer-nuernberg/events/314335755
> Hallo zusammen, die Softwerkskammer Nürnberg veranstaltet am Samstag 06.06.2026 den 8. SoCraTes Day Franken, unser jährliches Open Space Event.
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Oh, am 6. Juni ist wieder SoCraTes Day Franken. Wer kommt denn da noch vorbei?
https://www.meetup.com/softwerkskammer-nuernberg/events/314335755
> Hallo zusammen, die Softwerkskammer Nürnberg veranstaltet am Samstag 06.06.2026 den 8. SoCraTes Day Franken, unser jährliches Open Space Event.
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Oh, am 6. Juni ist wieder SoCraTes Day Franken. Wer kommt denn da noch vorbei?
https://www.meetup.com/softwerkskammer-nuernberg/events/314335755
> Hallo zusammen, die Softwerkskammer Nürnberg veranstaltet am Samstag 06.06.2026 den 8. SoCraTes Day Franken, unser jährliches Open Space Event.
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Oh, am 6. Juni ist wieder SoCraTes Day Franken. Wer kommt denn da noch vorbei?
https://www.meetup.com/softwerkskammer-nuernberg/events/314335755
> Hallo zusammen, die Softwerkskammer Nürnberg veranstaltet am Samstag 06.06.2026 den 8. SoCraTes Day Franken, unser jährliches Open Space Event.
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I feel the main problem with the whole #LLM and vibe coding hype is that people are not taking responsibility for their work.
Sure this isn't something new but LLMs make it way easier than before.
As someone whole likes to attend #SoCraTes events and thinks of their profession as craftsmanship it is really demotivating to see this.
I don't want to review shit all day.Maybe I'm going back to doing something where I can touch the result when I'm finished.
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Das Buch “Griff nach Gold – Die andere Geschichte der Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft” wird am Do., 28. Mai um 19.30 h von den Autoren Carlo Gomes und Glenn Jäger im “Beueler Buchladen” vorgestellt. Im Folgenden die Vorveröffentlichung ihres Vorwortes, freundlicherweise von Autor Jäger zur Verfügung gestellt.
Vorab
Was gäben wir für ihre Trikots: José Leandro Andrade, José Leônidas da Silva, Just ›Justo‹ Fontaine oder Eusébio. Oder Zinedine Zidane. Weltstars zu ihrer Zeit, die der Geschichte der Fußball-WMs ihren Stempel aufdrückten. Der eine, mutmaßlicher Erfinder des Scherenschlags, führte Uruguay 1930 zum Titel. Die nächsten drei jeweils Torschützenkönig: 1938 sieben Treffer für Brasilien, 1958 unerreichte 13 für Frankreich, 1966 neun für Portugal. Und Zidane, Weltmeister von 1998, ist Zidane. Was diese Spieler noch an Geschichte mitbringen? Dafür mag ihre Herkunft stehen: Sie waren Nachfahren von Sklaven, stammten aus Französisch-Marokko oder Portugiesisch-Ostafrika. Oder aus Algerien, die Eltern früh genug aufgebrochen, um dem Kolonialkrieg Frankreichs zu entrinnen. Bis heute schürft der Norden auch im Fußball das Gold.
Die Geschichte des Kolonialismus ist dem Fußball eingeschrieben – wie auch die des Neokolonialismus, nachdem in den 1950er und 60er Jahren mehr und mehr Länder ihre politische Unabhängigkeit erstritten. Und während der Zweite Weltkrieg eine zwölfjährige Unterbrechung der WMs bedeutete, hinterließen auch die Kriege seit den 1950er Jahren ihre Spuren im Weltfußball: Korea, Suez, Vietnam, Falkland etc. pp. Spuren indes, die vor allem in den Qualifikationen zu suchen sind. Gerade in den 1950er, 60er und 70er Jahren spiegelten sich dort die globalen Verwerfungen weit mehr als in jenen wenigen Sommerwochen, die für das größte Fest des Fußballs stehen. Die FIFA, mit Sitz im Herzen Westeuropas, war stets Ausdruck der Verhältnisse. Auch wenn bei der ersten WM, ›Uruguay 1930‹, als der noch junge Weltfußballverband alle Mitgliedsverbände zum Turnier einlud, noch etwas von einem Gedanken der Völkerverständigung zu erkennen war, wurde das oft beschworene Ideal künftig vielfach mit Füßen getreten.
Abgesehen von der politischen Schlagseite, siehe nur Italien 1934 unter Mussolini, war bei den WMs schon die zahlenmäßige Dominanz Europas lange Zeit erdrückend, oder besser: der Idee einer ›Welt‹meisterschaft kaum würdig. Jahrzehntelang beschränkte sich das Turnier im Wesentlichen auf zwei Kontinente. Für ›Schweden 1958‹ war ein einziger Platz für Afrika/Asien vorgesehen, der nach einer Reihe boykottierter Partien und einem außerplanmäßigen K.o.-Spiel an, ja richtig: Wales ging. Vier Jahre später, ›Chile 1962‹, war für die beiden Erdteile noch nicht einmal der eine direkte Startplatz vorgesehen, sodass jeweils nur europäische und amerikanische Teilnehmer antraten. Gerne wurde die Gemengelage mit der mangelnden Reife des asiatischen bzw. afrikanischen Fußballs gegenüber den arrivierten Ländern begründet.
Und in der Tat: In dieser Hinsicht klafften Welten zwischen den Kontinenten. 1938 bestritt Niederländisch-Indien ein einziges Spiel bei der Endrunde, das mit 0:6 an Ungarn ging. Südkorea packte 1954 nach einem 0:9 gegen Ungarn und einem 0:7 gegen die Türkei die Koffer, Zaire erging es 1974 ähnlich. Sehr viel mehr war bis dahin nicht, außer vielleicht der knappen Niederlage Ägyptens gegen Ungarn von 1934 (2:4), einem Punktgewinn Marokkos 1970 oder der Sensation Nordkoreas mit dem Einzug ins Viertelfinale 1966. Doch lagen die Gründe für den Entwicklungsstand gerade des afrikanischen Fußballs nicht in Europa selbst? Hatte der Kolonialismus nicht zur Folge, dass nationale Fußballverbände überhaupt erst mit der formalen Unabhängigkeit vieler Länder entstanden? Warum sonst maßen sich beim ersten Africa- Cup 1957 nur drei Mannschaften – Südafrika wurde apartheidsbedingt ausgeschlossen – in nur zwei Spielen? Und mehr noch: Wer griff eigentlich auf die Ressourcen eines Fontaine, eines Eusébio zu? Erst unter dem Druck eines zunehmenden antikolonialen Selbstbewusstseins bewegte sich die FIFA schließlich: Im Vorfeld von ›England 1966‹ hatte der afrikanische Kontinentalverband seine Drohung wahr gemacht, die WM zu boykottieren, wenn man nicht wenigstens einen direkten Startplatz bekäme.
Die WM-Qualifikationen sind weit weniger im kollektiven Fußballgedächtnis als die Endrunden selbst. Manche verdienen es, etwas ausführlicher gewürdigt zu werden, insofern sich daran weltpolitische Bruchlinien spiegeln – zwischen West und Ost wie zwischen Nord und Süd. Die Qualifikation zur WM 1958: geprägt vom Suezkrieg; die zur WM 1962: von einer ausgefallenen Partie, bei der die Niederlande der DDR-Auswahl die Einreise verweigerten; die zur WM 1974: von der Weigerung der Sowjetunion, in jenem Nationalstadion Chiles anzutreten, in dem unter Pinochet gerade noch massenhaft politische Gefangene interniert waren. Zuvor war das Estadio Nacional von FIFA-Funktionären, vor Ort empfangen von Vertretern der US-gestützten Militärjunta, für bedenkenlos erklärt worden. Mitunter waren es auch die Weltmeisterschaften selbst, die – siehe ›Argentinien 1978‹ oder ›Katar 2022‹ – zur politischen Nagelprobe wurden.
Und die Frage von Krieg und Frieden? Sie wurde 2022 in Bezug auf Russland von der FIFA anders beantwortet als in den Jahrzehnten zuvor. Ganz unabhängig davon, wie der Ukrainekrieg samt Vorgeschichte zu bewerten ist, und auch abgesehen davon, was von Ausschlüssen allgemein zu halten ist: Vergleichbare Maßnahmen wurden im Fall eines verheerenden Korea-, Vietnam- oder Irakkrieges genauso wenig auch nur in Betracht gezogen wie bei den Kriegen gegen Jugoslawien, Afghanistan oder Libyen. Vom Abessinien-, Algerien- oder Falklandkrieg ganz zu schweigen. Oder vom Griff nach Venezuela im WM-Jahr 2026. Zweierlei Maß? Weil die FIFA stets fest auf dem Boden einer westlich dominierten Weltordnung stand? Die Frage kriegerischer Auseinandersetzungen wird auf den folgenden Seiten wiederkehren. Nicht nur weil sie allgemein von überragender Bedeutung ist: An ihr muss sich auch ein Weltfußball messen lassen, der – ähnlich wie die Olympischen Spiele – die Völkerverständigung zu einem seiner Leitmotive erhoben hat.
Doch was tun? Mitunter waren es die Spieler selbst, die Antworten gaben: Ein Diego Maradona, ein Sócrates, ein Carlos Caszely oder ein Rachid Mekhloufi, der freiwillig auf einen WM-Einsatz für Frankreich verzichtete, um sich stattdessen der algerischen Unabhängigkeitsauswahl anzuschließen. Ihre Bedeutung weist über den Tag hinaus. Ihre Haltung gibt auch Hinweise auf die von Sehnsucht getriebene Frage vieler Fans, wie sich der Fußball in Zeiten galoppierender Kommerzialisierung ›zurückholen‹ lässt. Kurz: Frage nach den Verhältnissen, die diese hervorbringen. Sie wären zu ändern. Entsprechend bleibt, wo von der WM-Historie die Rede ist, weltweiten Bedingungen nachzugehen. Demnach sei hier der Versuch unternommen, eine Geschichte des Turniers zu erzählen, in der eine Globalgeschichte des 20. und des bisherigen 21. Jahrhunderts zumindest aufscheint.
Zur Ausgangslage gehört: Die WM-Geschichte an sich ist weitgehend auserzählt. Neue Schätze lassen sich bis auf wenige Ausnahmen – siehe hier: einen seltenen Fund aus Chile oder die Neudeutung einer Spielabsage Taiwans 1957 in der Qualifikation – kaum noch heben. Es bleibt, das vorhandene, teils verzweigte Material zu arrangieren. Zu dem Vorgehen, Entwicklungen in Fußball und Politik miteinander zu verknüpfen, mögen andere Bücher angeregt haben, etwa die Bände von Bernd-M. Beyer (›71/72. Die Saison der Träumer‹), Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling / Hubert Dahlkamp (›1974. Die WM der Genies‹), Burkhard Rierling (›Sommer 1954‹) oder Ronald Reng (›1974. Eine deutsche Begegnung‹). Oder des unerreichten Eduardo Galeano (›Der Ball ist rund‹).
Teils mögen sich dabei inhaltliche Vorzeichen unterscheiden, die Methode hingegen kaum. Und auch in großen WM-Darstellungen sind meist politische Einordnungen des Zeitgeschehens oder gesellschaftliche Hintergründe zum Gastgeberland zu finden. Das gilt für die vielbändigen WM-Chroniken der Süddeutschen Zeitung und des AGON Verlags ebenso wie für die große Fußball-WM-Enzyklopädie von Hardy Grüne und andere Kompendien aus dem Verlag Die Werkstatt. Neben Fußballlektüre haben wir Literatur zur Einordnung politischer Hintergründe herangezogen. Wer etwa die kleinen Beben rund um die WM 1966 verstehen will, stöbere in dem Band ›Neo-Colonialism‹. Der Autor, Kwame Nkrumah, war der erste Präsident Ghanas und galt als Initiator des WM-Boykotts afrikanischer Länder.
In Diskussionen über Wohl und Wehe der Boykottkampagne zu Katar 2022 hörten wir bisweilen: Und was ist mit der WM 2026 in Nordamerika? Wo werden dann Proteste gegen eine westliche Führungsmacht bleiben? Gegen eine Politik, die stets auch mithilfe von Kriegen, mit der Unterstützung von Staatsstreichen durchgesetzt wurde, mit Militärbasen in Ländern wie Katar? Jahrzehntelang im Schulterschluss mit Ländern wie Saudi-Arabien, gegen das zur WM 2034 der Zeigefinger zu erheben bleibt. Könnte zu alldem nicht mal ein Buch rausspringen?
Carlos Gomes / Glenn Jäger: Griff nach Gold – Die andere Geschichte der Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft; ISBN 978-3-89438-867-6; 415 Seiten; Hardcover; 28,- Euro [D]
Alle Links wurden nachträglich eingefügt.
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“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.”*…
Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David (source)Benjamin Ross Hoffman puts “the Socratic Method” into context– important, timely context…
There is a scene in Plato that contains, in miniature, the catastrophe of Athenian public life. Two men meet at a courthouse. One is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave. The other is there to be indicted for indecency. [or impiety– see here] The prosecutor, Euthyphro, is certain he understands what decency requires. The accused, Socrates, is not certain of anything, and says so. They talk.
Euthyphro’s confidence is striking. His own family thinks it is indecent for a son to prosecute his father; Euthyphro insists that true decency demands it, that he understands what the gods require better than his relatives do. Socrates, who is about to be tried for teaching indecency toward the gods, asks Euthyphro to explain what decency actually is, since Euthyphro claims to know, and Socrates will need such knowledge for his own defense.
Euthyphro’s first answer is: decency is what I am doing right now, prosecuting wrongdoers regardless of kinship. Socrates points out that this is an example, not a definition. There are many decent acts; what makes them all decent?
Euthyphro tries again: decency is what the gods love. But the gods disagree among themselves, Socrates observes, so by this definition the same act could be both decent and indecent. Euthyphro refines: decency is what all the gods love. And here Socrates asks a question Euthyphro cannot answer: do the gods love decent things because they are decent, or are things decent because the gods love them?
If decent things are decent because the gods love them, then decency is arbitrary, a matter of divine whim. Socrates is too polite to say so, but the implication is: if decency is defined by the arbitrary whim of our betters, who are you to prosecute your father?
If the gods love decent things because they are decent, then however we know this, we already know the standard for decency ourselves and can cut out the middleman. But then Euthyphro should be able to explain the standard. He can’t.
Euthyphro tries a few more times, suggesting that decency is a kind of service to the gods, a kind of trade with the gods. Each time Socrates gently follows the definition to its consequences, and each time it collapses. Eventually Euthyphro leaves, saying he is in a hurry. Socrates’ last words are a lament: you have abandoned me without the understanding I needed for my own defense.
This is usually read as a proto-academic dialogue about definitions. It is a scene from a civilization in crisis. A man is about to use the legal system to destroy his own father on the basis of a concept he cannot define, in a courthouse where another man is about to be destroyed by the same concept. And the man who cannot define it is not unusual. He is representative.
The indecency for which Socrates was being prosecuted seems to have consisted of asking just the sort of questions Socrates posed to Euthyphro…
[Hoffman sketches the culture and politics of Athens in the late fifth century, the role of the Sophists, and the (radical) role that Socrates played…]
… Plato also responded to his beloved mentor’s death by founding the Academy, a great house in Athens where philosophical reasoning was taught methodically. We still have our Academics.
Agnes Callard, in her recent book Open Socrates, wants Socrates to be timeless. She strips out the historical situation, strips out the aliveness that preceded the method, and ends up defending a method that’s obviously inapplicable in many of the cases where she claims it applies. Aristarchus did not need his assumptions questioned at random. He needed someone who could ask probing questions about his actual problem, from a perspective that didn’t share his assumptions about what was and wasn’t possible.
Zvi Mowshowitz, in his review of Callard’s book (part 1, part 2), argues at considerable length that the decontextualized version is bad. He is right. Cached beliefs are usually fine. Destabilizing them is usually harmful. Most people do not want to spend their lives in Socratic questioning, and they are right.
But Zvi has written a long polemic in two installments on the winning side of an incredibly lame debate about whether we should anxiously doubt ourselves all the time, responding to Callard’s decontextualized Socrates, not the real one. The real one did not devise a method and then apply it. He had a quality, something the oracle reached for the language of the tragedians to describe. And what was memorialized as a “method” was what happened when that quality met a city where every other participant in public life had stopped being alive.
Socrates invokes timeless considerations like logical coherence, and committing (even provisionally) to specific claims; these are very natural things to try to appeal to when people are being squirmy, dramatic, hard to pin down, and fleeing to abstractions that resist falsification.
Spinoza, in the Theologico-Political Treatise, similarly resituated the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in their proper context. The political teachings of the Gospels to turn the other cheek, forgive debts, and render unto Caesar what is due to him, are instructions for people living under a hostile and extractive system of domination. Citizens of a free republic have entirely different duties. They have an affirmative obligation to hold each other accountable, to sue people who have wronged them, to participate in collective self-governance. The teachings are not wrong. They are addressed to a specific situation, and become wrong when mechanically transplanted into an inappropriate context.
The reason to recover the historical Socrates is not only accuracy about the distant past; it is that by seeing this relevant aspect of the past more clearly, we might see more clearly what we are up against now.
Socratic cross-examination requires an interlocutor who at least would feel ashamed not to put on a show of accountability. The people Socrates questioned were performing wisdom, but they were performing it because the culture still demanded that leaders seem accountable. They would sit for the examination, because refusing would be disgraceful, like breaking formation in a hoplite phalanx. Their scripts collapsed because the scripts were designed to look like real accountability, and real accountability is what Socrates brought.
There is a useful framework for understanding how public discourse degrades, which distinguishes between guilt, shame, and depravity. A guilty person has violated a norm and intends to repair the breach by owning up and making amends. An ashamed person intends to conceal the violation, which means deflecting investigation. A depraved person has generalized the intent to conceal into a coalitional strategy: I will cover for you if you cover for me, and together we will derail any investigation that threatens either of us.
The leaders Socrates questioned were, at worst, ashamed. They had taken on roles they couldn’t account for, and they wanted to hide that fact, but they still felt the force of the demand for accountability. When Socrates pressed them, they squirmed, they went in circles, they eventually fled. But they engaged. They felt they had to engage. The culture of Athens, even in its degraded state, still held that a man who refused to give an account of his claims was disgraced.
Depravity is a further stage, and Sartre described it precisely in his book Anti-Semite and Jew:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
The depraved person does not perform accountability. He plays with the forms of accountability to exhaust and humiliate the person who still takes them seriously. He is not running a script that is trying to pass as a perspective, collapsing only under the kind of questioning we still call Socratic. He is amusing himself at the expense of the questioner. Cross-examination does not expose him, because he was never trying to seem consistent. He was trying to demonstrate that consistency is for suckers. The Socratic method will not help him.
The Socratic method, if we can rightly call it that, was forged by the pressures confronted by a living mind in a city of the ashamed, people who still cared enough about accountability to fake it. It has nothing to say to the depraved themselves, who have dispensed with the pretense, though in a transitional period might expose them to the judgment of the naïve.
But the quality that preceded the method is something else.
What the oracle recognized in Socrates was not the ability to cross-examine. It was something closer to what it recognized in Euripides: the capacity to be present to what is happening, to see the person in front of you rather than the drama you are supposed to enact with them, to respond to the situation rather than to your script about the situation. To be alive.
We do not need a new method. Methods are what you formalize after you understand the problem, and we are not there yet. What might still help us is the quality that precedes method: the willingness to see what is in front of us, to say the obvious thing that everyone embedded in the performance is too scripted to see, and to keep reaching out to others even when the response is usually not even embarrassment but indifference, not even a failed defense but a smirk.
The oracle didn’t say Socrates had the best method. It said he was the wisest man, in a society oriented against wisdom. The “method” was just how aliveness was memorialized by a city that still cared enough to be ashamed of being dead.
The question for us is what aliveness looks like in a city beyond shame…
Eminently worth reading in full.
The Socratic Method and the importance of recognizing and responding to the times in which we live: “Socrates is Mortal“
See also: “The real reason Socrates was given the death sentence– humiliating powerful people was not a key to success“
Apposite: “What Separates The Great From The Petty In History” (“embracing the relentless ally of reality makes all the difference”)
* Socrates
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As we inhabit our moment, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to David Hume; he was born on this date in 1711. A philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, he developed a highly-influential system of empiricism, philosophical scepticism, and metaphysical naturalism.
Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience; this places him amongst such empiricists as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Locke, and George Berkeley.
Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified empirically; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. People never actually perceive that one event causes another but experience only the “constant conjunction” of events. This problem of induction means that to draw any causal inferences from past experience, it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past; this metaphysical presupposition cannot itself be grounded in prior experience.
An opponent of philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behaviour, proclaiming that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Hume was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principle. He maintained an early commitment to naturalistic explanations of moral phenomena and is usually accepted by historians of European philosophy to have first clearly expounded the is–ought problem, or the idea that a statement of fact alone can never give rise to a normative conclusion of what ought to be done.
Hume denied that people have an actual conception of the self, positing that they experience only a bundle of sensations and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of perceptions connected by an association of ideas. Hume’s compatibilist theory of free will takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom. His philosophy of religion, including his rejection of miracles and critique of the argument from design, was especially controversial. Hume left a legacy that affected utilitarianism, logical positivism, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive science, theology and many other fields and thinkers. Immanuel Kant credited Hume as the inspiration that had awakened him from his “dogmatic slumbers.”
– source
Apropos the piece featured above, see Peter Kreeft‘s Socrates Meets Hume- The Father of Philosophy Meets
Portrait of David Hume by Allan Ramsay, 1766 (source) #Athens #culture #DavidHume #empiricism #history #Kant #philosophy #politics #scepticism #Socrates #SocraticMethod
The Father of Modern Skepticism (“A Socratic Examination of [Hume’s] An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding“) -
“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.”*…
Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David (source)Benjamin Ross Hoffman puts “the Socratic Method” into context– important, timely context…
There is a scene in Plato that contains, in miniature, the catastrophe of Athenian public life. Two men meet at a courthouse. One is there to prosecute his own father for the death of a slave. The other is there to be indicted for indecency. [or impiety– see here] The prosecutor, Euthyphro, is certain he understands what decency requires. The accused, Socrates, is not certain of anything, and says so. They talk.
Euthyphro’s confidence is striking. His own family thinks it is indecent for a son to prosecute his father; Euthyphro insists that true decency demands it, that he understands what the gods require better than his relatives do. Socrates, who is about to be tried for teaching indecency toward the gods, asks Euthyphro to explain what decency actually is, since Euthyphro claims to know, and Socrates will need such knowledge for his own defense.
Euthyphro’s first answer is: decency is what I am doing right now, prosecuting wrongdoers regardless of kinship. Socrates points out that this is an example, not a definition. There are many decent acts; what makes them all decent?
Euthyphro tries again: decency is what the gods love. But the gods disagree among themselves, Socrates observes, so by this definition the same act could be both decent and indecent. Euthyphro refines: decency is what all the gods love. And here Socrates asks a question Euthyphro cannot answer: do the gods love decent things because they are decent, or are things decent because the gods love them?
If decent things are decent because the gods love them, then decency is arbitrary, a matter of divine whim. Socrates is too polite to say so, but the implication is: if decency is defined by the arbitrary whim of our betters, who are you to prosecute your father?
If the gods love decent things because they are decent, then however we know this, we already know the standard for decency ourselves and can cut out the middleman. But then Euthyphro should be able to explain the standard. He can’t.
Euthyphro tries a few more times, suggesting that decency is a kind of service to the gods, a kind of trade with the gods. Each time Socrates gently follows the definition to its consequences, and each time it collapses. Eventually Euthyphro leaves, saying he is in a hurry. Socrates’ last words are a lament: you have abandoned me without the understanding I needed for my own defense.
This is usually read as a proto-academic dialogue about definitions. It is a scene from a civilization in crisis. A man is about to use the legal system to destroy his own father on the basis of a concept he cannot define, in a courthouse where another man is about to be destroyed by the same concept. And the man who cannot define it is not unusual. He is representative.
The indecency for which Socrates was being prosecuted seems to have consisted of asking just the sort of questions Socrates posed to Euthyphro…
[Hoffman sketches the culture and politics of Athens in the late fifth century, the role of the Sophists, and the (radical) role that Socrates played…]
… Plato also responded to his beloved mentor’s death by founding the Academy, a great house in Athens where philosophical reasoning was taught methodically. We still have our Academics.
Agnes Callard, in her recent book Open Socrates, wants Socrates to be timeless. She strips out the historical situation, strips out the aliveness that preceded the method, and ends up defending a method that’s obviously inapplicable in many of the cases where she claims it applies. Aristarchus did not need his assumptions questioned at random. He needed someone who could ask probing questions about his actual problem, from a perspective that didn’t share his assumptions about what was and wasn’t possible.
Zvi Mowshowitz, in his review of Callard’s book (part 1, part 2), argues at considerable length that the decontextualized version is bad. He is right. Cached beliefs are usually fine. Destabilizing them is usually harmful. Most people do not want to spend their lives in Socratic questioning, and they are right.
But Zvi has written a long polemic in two installments on the winning side of an incredibly lame debate about whether we should anxiously doubt ourselves all the time, responding to Callard’s decontextualized Socrates, not the real one. The real one did not devise a method and then apply it. He had a quality, something the oracle reached for the language of the tragedians to describe. And what was memorialized as a “method” was what happened when that quality met a city where every other participant in public life had stopped being alive.
Socrates invokes timeless considerations like logical coherence, and committing (even provisionally) to specific claims; these are very natural things to try to appeal to when people are being squirmy, dramatic, hard to pin down, and fleeing to abstractions that resist falsification.
Spinoza, in the Theologico-Political Treatise, similarly resituated the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in their proper context. The political teachings of the Gospels to turn the other cheek, forgive debts, and render unto Caesar what is due to him, are instructions for people living under a hostile and extractive system of domination. Citizens of a free republic have entirely different duties. They have an affirmative obligation to hold each other accountable, to sue people who have wronged them, to participate in collective self-governance. The teachings are not wrong. They are addressed to a specific situation, and become wrong when mechanically transplanted into an inappropriate context.
The reason to recover the historical Socrates is not only accuracy about the distant past; it is that by seeing this relevant aspect of the past more clearly, we might see more clearly what we are up against now.
Socratic cross-examination requires an interlocutor who at least would feel ashamed not to put on a show of accountability. The people Socrates questioned were performing wisdom, but they were performing it because the culture still demanded that leaders seem accountable. They would sit for the examination, because refusing would be disgraceful, like breaking formation in a hoplite phalanx. Their scripts collapsed because the scripts were designed to look like real accountability, and real accountability is what Socrates brought.
There is a useful framework for understanding how public discourse degrades, which distinguishes between guilt, shame, and depravity. A guilty person has violated a norm and intends to repair the breach by owning up and making amends. An ashamed person intends to conceal the violation, which means deflecting investigation. A depraved person has generalized the intent to conceal into a coalitional strategy: I will cover for you if you cover for me, and together we will derail any investigation that threatens either of us.
The leaders Socrates questioned were, at worst, ashamed. They had taken on roles they couldn’t account for, and they wanted to hide that fact, but they still felt the force of the demand for accountability. When Socrates pressed them, they squirmed, they went in circles, they eventually fled. But they engaged. They felt they had to engage. The culture of Athens, even in its degraded state, still held that a man who refused to give an account of his claims was disgraced.
Depravity is a further stage, and Sartre described it precisely in his book Anti-Semite and Jew:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
The depraved person does not perform accountability. He plays with the forms of accountability to exhaust and humiliate the person who still takes them seriously. He is not running a script that is trying to pass as a perspective, collapsing only under the kind of questioning we still call Socratic. He is amusing himself at the expense of the questioner. Cross-examination does not expose him, because he was never trying to seem consistent. He was trying to demonstrate that consistency is for suckers. The Socratic method will not help him.
The Socratic method, if we can rightly call it that, was forged by the pressures confronted by a living mind in a city of the ashamed, people who still cared enough about accountability to fake it. It has nothing to say to the depraved themselves, who have dispensed with the pretense, though in a transitional period might expose them to the judgment of the naïve.
But the quality that preceded the method is something else.
What the oracle recognized in Socrates was not the ability to cross-examine. It was something closer to what it recognized in Euripides: the capacity to be present to what is happening, to see the person in front of you rather than the drama you are supposed to enact with them, to respond to the situation rather than to your script about the situation. To be alive.
We do not need a new method. Methods are what you formalize after you understand the problem, and we are not there yet. What might still help us is the quality that precedes method: the willingness to see what is in front of us, to say the obvious thing that everyone embedded in the performance is too scripted to see, and to keep reaching out to others even when the response is usually not even embarrassment but indifference, not even a failed defense but a smirk.
The oracle didn’t say Socrates had the best method. It said he was the wisest man, in a society oriented against wisdom. The “method” was just how aliveness was memorialized by a city that still cared enough to be ashamed of being dead.
The question for us is what aliveness looks like in a city beyond shame…
Eminently worth reading in full.
The Socratic Method and the importance of recognizing and responding to the times in which we live: “Socrates is Mortal“
See also: “The real reason Socrates was given the death sentence– humiliating powerful people was not a key to success“
Apposite: “What Separates The Great From The Petty In History” (“embracing the relentless ally of reality makes all the difference”)
* Socrates
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As we inhabit our moment, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to David Hume; he was born on this date in 1711. A philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, he developed a highly-influential system of empiricism, philosophical scepticism, and metaphysical naturalism.
Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience; this places him amongst such empiricists as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Locke, and George Berkeley.
Hume argued that inductive reasoning and belief in causality cannot be justified empirically; instead, they result from custom and mental habit. People never actually perceive that one event causes another but experience only the “constant conjunction” of events. This problem of induction means that to draw any causal inferences from past experience, it is necessary to presuppose that the future will resemble the past; this metaphysical presupposition cannot itself be grounded in prior experience.
An opponent of philosophical rationalists, Hume held that passions rather than reason govern human behaviour, proclaiming that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” Hume was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on emotion or sentiment rather than abstract moral principle. He maintained an early commitment to naturalistic explanations of moral phenomena and is usually accepted by historians of European philosophy to have first clearly expounded the is–ought problem, or the idea that a statement of fact alone can never give rise to a normative conclusion of what ought to be done.
Hume denied that people have an actual conception of the self, positing that they experience only a bundle of sensations and that the self is nothing more than this bundle of perceptions connected by an association of ideas. Hume’s compatibilist theory of free will takes causal determinism as fully compatible with human freedom. His philosophy of religion, including his rejection of miracles and critique of the argument from design, was especially controversial. Hume left a legacy that affected utilitarianism, logical positivism, the philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive science, theology and many other fields and thinkers. Immanuel Kant credited Hume as the inspiration that had awakened him from his “dogmatic slumbers.”
– source
Apropos the piece featured above, see Peter Kreeft‘s Socrates Meets Hume- The Father of Philosophy Meets
Portrait of David Hume by Allan Ramsay, 1766 (source) #Athens #culture #DavidHume #empiricism #history #Kant #philosophy #politics #scepticism #Socrates #SocraticMethod
The Father of Modern Skepticism (“A Socratic Examination of [Hume’s] An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding“) -
Yay, I won the #SoCraTes2026 ticket lottery, now I can plan my travel!
That'll be 2 #SoCraTes that I'll be attending this year (so far?).
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Yay, I won the #SoCraTes2026 ticket lottery, now I can plan my travel!
That'll be 2 #SoCraTes that I'll be attending this year (so far?).
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Yay, I won the #SoCraTes2026 ticket lottery, now I can plan my travel!
That'll be 2 #SoCraTes that I'll be attending this year (so far?).
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Yay, I won the #SoCraTes2026 ticket lottery, now I can plan my travel!
That'll be 2 #SoCraTes that I'll be attending this year (so far?).
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Yay, I won the #SoCraTes2026 ticket lottery, now I can plan my travel!
That'll be 2 #SoCraTes that I'll be attending this year (so far?).
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Philosopher Socrates offered the perfect advice for anyone struggling with self-identity
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Philosopher Socrates offered the perfect advice for anyone struggling with self-identity
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Philosopher Socrates offered the perfect advice for anyone struggling with self-identity
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Philosopher Socrates offered the perfect advice for anyone struggling with self-identity
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Uneasy Wisdom
Unlike that Athenian gadfly
#Joy #Life #Poem #Poetry #Socrates #Sorrow
I know, and I know that I know
And I also know
Joys of various hues
Have as much a claim on me
As any good ol’ sorrows
And I know that my lot
As that of all here
Is to be sitting on this seesaw
Until Newton’s First Law kicks in
And the seesaw is no longer seen. -
Uneasy Wisdom
Unlike that Athenian gadfly
#Joy #Life #Poem #Poetry #Socrates #Sorrow
I know, and I know that I know
And I also know
Joys of various hues
Have as much a claim on me
As any good ol’ sorrows
And I know that my lot
As that of all here
Is to be sitting on this seesaw
Until Newton’s First Law kicks in
And the seesaw is no longer seen. -
from #socrates & #plato's #philosophy, the #apology.
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from #socrates & #plato's #philosophy, the #apology.
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„Ich weiß, dass ich nichts weiß" – sagte Sokrates.
Anders die KI: Sie wird darauf trainiert, immer zu antworten, kompetent zu klingen. Ohne Zweifel.
Forscher nennen das „eloquente Ignoranz" – die Fähigkeit, überzeugend und flüssig falsch zu liegen.
GPT-4 vergab in einer Studie 87% seiner Antworten die höchste Konfidenz – auch bei faktisch falschen.
# philosphy #ki #socrates
#KritischDenken -
Socrates disapproved of Democracy and he was correct.
https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1CXpF81UJM/
#democracy #popularity #dictators #uneducated #voting #philosophy #socrates
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Software testers do peer conferences (aka unconferences) right! Here are three examples of software tester conference awesomeness.
https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/index.php/event-design/2022/09/doing-peer-conferences-right
#meetings #unconference #SoCraTes #PeerConference #SoftwareTesting #eventprofs #assnchat
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Software testers do peer conferences (aka unconferences) right! Here are three examples of software tester conference awesomeness.
https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/index.php/event-design/2022/09/doing-peer-conferences-right
#meetings #unconference #SoCraTes #PeerConference #SoftwareTesting #eventprofs #assnchat
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Software testers do peer conferences (aka unconferences) right! Here are three examples of software tester conference awesomeness.
https://www.conferencesthatwork.com/index.php/event-design/2022/09/doing-peer-conferences-right
#meetings #unconference #SoCraTes #PeerConference #SoftwareTesting #eventprofs #assnchat
