Tag: Socrates

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…)

Socrates

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English original here, Traducciones: Francés, Polaco

Capítulo 1 aquí, Capítulo 5 aquí

La más reciente reproducción de este ensayo fue una charla el 14 de octubre de 2012 en Seattle. Quiero dar las gracias por la estimulante discusión a todos los que estuvieron presentes. La presentación original tuvo lugar en mi lección de apertura de las clases sobre Introducción a la Filosofía que daba en la década de 1990 en la universidad. (more…)

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Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

4. The Ascetic Ideal

The third essay that makes up On the Genealogy of Morality is concerned with asceticism, as it has exhibited itself in religion and in philosophy. Nietzsche writes:

I can think of hardly anything that has sapped the health and racial strength of precisely the Europeans so destructively as [the ascetic ideal]; without any exaggeration we are entitled to call it the real catastrophe in the history of the health of Europeans. (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…)

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Greg Johnson is teaching a five-week course on Plato’s Gorgias on Counter-Currents Radio, which will continue on three Saturdays later this month (July 15, 22, and 29). The second lecture, which dealt with Socrates’ discussion with Polus from 461b to 481b, can be heard below. A visual aid that accompanies the lecture is 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…)

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In Greece in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, the sophists were highly-prized teachers of the art or craft (techne) of rhetoric. (The Greek word techne is the root of our words technique and technology.)

Socrates was widely seen as a sophist, for instance in Aristophanes’ Clouds. To a naïve bystander, Socrates certainly looked like a sophist. Like the sophists, Socrates spent a great deal of time arguing about ideas. Moreover, Socrates was seen arguing with known sophists, including the greatest sophists of them all, Gorgias and Protagoras, as depicted in the Platonic dialogues which bear their names. (more…)

Seated Socrates, fresco from ancient Ephesus

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Every educated person should be familiar with Plato, but higher education today is usually a barrier to understanding the great thinkers of the past. Hence the need for Counter-Currents, which Jonathan Bowden described as an online university of the Right.

In the next five Saturday Counter-Currents Radio livestreams (June 24 and July 1, 8, 15, and 22), Greg Johnson will lecture on Plato’s dialogue Gorgias. The theme of the course is “Might vs. Right.” (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…)