Tag: Greek philosophy

François-André Vincent, Alcibades Being Taught by Socrates (1776)

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Greg Johnson is teaching a five-week course on Plato’s Gorgias on Counter-Currents Radio, and the last lecture is now available. See below. Topics discussed include:

1. How we can secure ourselves against doing injustice but not really against suffering it? (more…)

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Greg Johnson is teaching a five-week course on Plato’s Gorgias on Counter-Currents Radio. The last lecture will be aired this Saturday, July 29. The fourth lecture, on Plato versus hedonism, can be heard below. An accompanying text, “Four arguments against hedonism in the Gorgias,” is here. (more…)

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Greg Johnson is teaching a five-week course on Plato’s Gorgias on Counter-Currents Radio, which will continue for the next two Saturdays later this month (July 22 and 29). The third lecture, focusing on the first third of Socrates’ discussion with Callicles, can be heard below. The first lecture can be heard here, and the second here.

The theme of the course is “Might vs. Right.” Dr. Johnson is using Donald J. Zeyl’s translation of the Gorgias published by Hackett as both a separate book and as part of their Plato Complete Works volume. (more…)

You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.

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The trial and death of Socrates is one of the most compelling places to begin one’s philosophical education. — Greg Johnson, The Trial of Socrates

Everyone strives to obtain the law. — Franz Kafka, The Trial

Philosophy in the West has been withering on the vine for decades. A combination of Jacques Derrida’s “death of the civilization of the book” and the replacement of that civilization with Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle” has rendered philosophy outmoded, antique, and frankly too much like hard work for an intellectually undemanding generation. (more…)

Heidegger (right) and Husserl in 1921.

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In my “Notes on Strauss and Husserl,” I discuss the following passage from Leo Strauss’ Natural Right and History:

To grasp the natural world as a world that is radically prescientific or prephilosophic, one has to go back behind the first emergence of science or philosophy. It is not necessary for this purpose to engage in extensive and necessarily hypothetical anthropological studies. The information that classical philosophy supplies about its origins suffices . . . (more…)

Raphael, The School of Athens (1511)

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It is important to realize that “true” and “false,” like “free” and “unfree,” do not stand for anything simple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a right and proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing. — J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (1962) (more…)

You can pre-order Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

The following is an excerpt from Greg Johnson’s forthcoming book, The Trial of Socrates, which is available for pre-order at a $5 discount from now until its release on June 30. See here for details.

Socrates’s Flight to the Logoi

Socrates literally calls his second-best method his “second sailing,” which is an allusion to a comment made earlier by Simmias: (more…)

You can pre-order Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

The following is an excerpt from Greg Johnson’s forthcoming book, The Trial of Socrates, which is available for pre-order at a $5 discount from now until its release on June 30. See here for details.

Plato’s Phaedo depicts the final conversations and death of Socrates. The Phaedo takes place the day after the Crito. While Crito was trying to convince Socrates to escape, other friends of Socrates were waiting outside the prison to spirit him away. Among them were two Pythagoreans from Thebes, Simmias and Cebes, who had brought the money to bribe the guards. (more…)

Edmund Husserl

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Leo Strauss credited Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology as a critical resource for his project of overthrowing modern political thought and vindicating the ancients. This may come as some surprise to readers of Strauss, given the prominence of his critique of historicism, which applies to Husserl as well. But Strauss’s late essay, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science and Political Philosophy”[1] as well as posthumously published lectures and correspondence reveal significant debts to Husserl.

Husserl was not, moreover, a mere “negative influence” — i.e., someone whose ideas Strauss rejected. Husserl was a “positive influence,” meaning that Strauss accepted and incorporated some of his ideas. (more…)

Aristophanes

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

Strepsiades Flunks Out

It hasn’t gone well. First Socrates bursts out of the Thinkery swearing an oath: “By Respiration, by Chaos, by the Air.” The usual places of gods in his oath are occupied by three natural forces. Socrates then rants about a particularly bad student who is “rustic . . . resourceless . . . dull . . . and forgetful.” Then he calls this student to come out. And out comes Strepsiades.

Socrates then quizzes Strepsiades on what he has learned. (more…)

A sixteenth-century engraving of Strepsiades, his son, and Socrates in Clouds.

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Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

“The Thinkery, a likeness of death, teaching Whirligig and Bamboozle, ‘back to nature’ without families, without the old paternal gods, and without nomoi (not paying back money owed and using unusual forms of words) . . .” — Thomas Prufer (more…)

Epictetus, in an eighteenth-century English artist’s imagining.

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Socrates was not in prison since he was there of his own free will. — Epictetus

I’m free.
And freedom tastes of reality.
— The Who

We should talk about slavery. Goodness knows, it’s not a subject we hear talked about much these days. That’s my dose of irony, now for some history. If you were at school or college today in the West, you would know that no slavery existed until a man called Jim Crow had his people — probably the Ku Klux Klan, or Donald Trump’s ancestors — sail to Africa, cast black people into chains, and then bring them back to America to pick cotton and be lynched. (more…)