Posted on 08/03/2025 9:02:25 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Shouldn’t this be in “Breaking News”?
The Socratic teaching method, works very well and fosters critical thinking in students. It really should be revitalized and used, to some extent today, but isn’t; sadly.
Socrates pre-existed the Stoics. Plato’s writings (Plato was a student of Socrates) are considered by many to be a foundation of all Philosophy.
His method of teaching ( very new at that time ), was a question and answer method.
His method of teaching was once very popular in early days of this nation and only began to become less used in the middle of the 20th century, which is a shame.
Learning my rote has its place ( memorizing the times table, the chemical chart, the dates of important battles and wars ); however, none of that make a student THINK! The Socratic method is the best way for a student to think critically. The student must critically look at what he or she "thinks" ( i.e. WHY, WHAT BACKS UP THAT OPINION, WHAT PROOF IS THERE) as well as to view the topic with an open mind. Also the student must be able to think on his/her feet.
I like both philosophies but I must say I am partial to the Stoics.
Yes, and Plato was a teacher of Aristotle who in turn was a teacher of Alexander the Great.
Thanks for the correction.
I had to suffer through a required philosophy class, when I was in college, and evidently I still remember quite a lot of it. :-)
But the teaching method and why it works, is my own opinion, based of the facts I know and also the way I was taught, compared to teaching methods now, that I know about.
The worst form of government, he said, was a tyranny, which is exactly what the Spartans imposed after their victory. (This was letting them off easy, the Thebans wanted Athens utterly destroyed. The Spartans, knowing that would make the Thebans an unchallenged hegemon if they did, demurred.)
Thence the Thirty. Of whom, as the author points out, were some unpopular characters: Critias, perhaps the most ruthless, was one of Socrates' students, although Socrates repudiated him during the brief reign of the Thirty. Xenophon was also a student and one of the two chroniclers of Socrates' death. (He may even have been an enforcer for the Thirty but this is highly controversial). The other, Plato, wasn't there - he was quite a young man at the time, was also close to the families of the Thirty, and was in hiding for the most part. The death he describes in The Apology was pure fiction - dying of hemlock poisoning is anything but gentle and peaceful.
So the democrats overthrew the Thirty and returned to power in Athens, knowing that Socrates was a well-known critic and accusing him of being sympathetic to the reign of the Thirty (he was not). The charge of impiety was a ruse. They wanted rid of him and were expecting him to accept ostracism from Athens for ten years instead of drinking the hemlock. As he was in his 70's, tired and beat up from the tumultuous last couple of years, he preferred death in his city to death as a lonely traveler. It was, in fact, a political murder even if it wasn't quite what the accusers had in mind.
Great article.
There is a high price to pay when not being compliant and thinking for oneself.
Anyone that denies that, ask someone that refused the Covid vaccine, or didn’t want to play the social distancing and mask games.
If one was alive in 399BC how would they know what year it is? Nobody had even heard of Christ-he wasn’t born.
He knew too much.
King James Plato? Or just a lot of Cambridge?
Maybe I missed it, but I don’t see that referred to in what he wrote. Of course, they weren’t using the Gregorian calendar back then, but they did have types of calendars.
“I drank what?”
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