Introduction to Philosophy: Apology, lecture 2
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Overview
Abraham Stone examines three connected questions in Plato’s Apology: whether Socrates teaches, whether his activity benefits Athens, and whether he behaves justly at his trial. By distinguishing imitation, education aimed at virtue, and persuasion, Stone shows that teaching can improve students while still serving a contested purpose; the trial’s penalty phase then raises the possibility that Socrates’s conduct undermines the city’s ability to reproduce its own political practices.
Key takeaways
- The Apology uses teaching in multiple senses: making others imitate you, training them toward an appropriate virtue, and persuading them to believe or do something.
- Aristotle’s account of arete links virtue to function: excellence makes something good and helps it perform its ergon, but the chosen function can serve someone else’s purposes.
- Socrates’s claim that he never taught is compatible with his claim that he persuaded Athenians to care for virtue if he is denying paid, formal education rather than all influence.
- Persuasion does not automatically benefit its target: the claim may be false, or believing the truth may not always be beneficial.
- Socrates’s proposal of free meals in the Prytaneum treats his unpaid service to Athens as deserving public honor, but risks alienating jurors during the penalty phase.
- Socrates may benefit individuals while harming the city’s political process: Stone links his conduct at trial to disruption of the system by which Athens reproduces its civic practices.
Chapters
- Stone frames the lecture around whether Socrates teaches, benefits Athens, and behaves justly at his trial.
- Each question depends on what terms such as teaching, benefit, better, and justice mean.
- Stone argues that philosophical inquiry should clarify a question’s terms before attempting to answer it.
- The Greek verb didaskein, the source of English words such as didactic, appears in accusations that Socrates teaches others.
- In the Euthyphro, Athenians are described as angered by people they think make others like themselves.
- The imagined indictment in the Apology accuses Socrates of teaching others to investigate and strengthen weaker arguments.
- Making others like oneself does not, by definition, make them better.
- Athenians may view the practice of making the weaker argument stronger as corrupting rather than beneficial.
- Whether imitation helps students depends on whether the person they imitate is actually better.
- Socrates uses paideuein, translated as educating or training, when denying that he educates people for money.
- The Apology treats paideuein and didaskein as closely related when discussing sophists such as Evenus.
- Socrates compares educating young people to training young horses, suggesting that education aims at improvement rather than simply imitation.
- Socrates asks who could make Callias’s sons noble and good if they had been born colts or calves.
- The Greek word arete is traditionally translated as virtue, though some translators prefer excellence.
- Training is presented as giving an animal or person the arete appropriate to their kind.
- Stone favors the consistent translation of arete as virtue, even when calling a horse virtuous sounds unusual in English.
- Keeping a stable translation helps readers connect Plato and Aristotle with later writers such as Descartes, who use the Latin virtus.
- Translation traditions preserve philosophical debates about what virtue means across centuries.
- Training a horse aims to make it a better horse, not to make it resemble its human trainer.
- The horse example shows that education need not mean making students like the person teaching them.
- What counts as appropriate virtue depends on the work or function expected of the trained individual.
- Stone connects the Apology’s discussion of training to the Euthyphro’s proposed definition of piety as skilled service to the gods.
- The Greek word ergon can mean work, activity, or function, and Socrates asks what work a particular skillful service produces.
- The example suggests that a service is assessed in relation to the purpose of the person or power it serves.
- In Nicomachean Ethics 2.6, Aristotle says arete both makes a thing good and enables it to perform its function well.
- A horse’s excellence includes galloping, carrying its rider, and facing an enemy.
- Because a horse’s function is framed around human purposes, its training may benefit people more directly than the horse.
- Socrates asks who can oversee Callias’s sons in the virtue of a human being and citizen, also rendered as human and political virtue.
- The phrase can describe one combined human-political virtue or two distinct educational aims.
- Aristotle’s claim that humans are political animals supports the reading that education prepares young people to play a role in the city.
- Socrates says it is more just to teach and persuade judges than to beg them for acquittal.
- In this context, teaching means getting someone to believe something.
- Socrates rejects common courtroom appeals that defendants used, including weeping or bringing children before the jury.
- Persuasion can make someone believe a claim even when the person persuading them does not believe it.
- Stone points to the Republic’s noble lie, which philosopher-rulers use to persuade citizens of a story about their origins.
- Persuasion improves someone only if the belief is true and believing it is beneficial, conditions Stone treats as uncertain.
- Socrates says he privately urged Athenians to care for virtue, acting like a father or older brother.
- Stone reads this as persuasion toward virtuous conduct, not merely approval of virtue as an idea.
- If Socrates sincerely wants others to act as he does, his persuasion also makes them more like himself.
- Socrates explicitly denies being anyone’s teacher, using a term derived from didaskein.
- Stone argues that the denial cannot cover all persuasion, since Socrates claims to have benefited Athenians by urging them toward virtue.
- The immediate context narrows the denial to formal teaching, particularly the education for payment associated with the sophists.
- The Apology’s accusation concerns young people learning to make weaker arguments stronger, a practice associated with sophists such as Protagoras and Gorgias.
- The Euthydemus depicts Euthydemus and Dionysodorus performing displays of argument, compared to contests in wrestling.
- Stone notes political suspicions about Socrates’s associates but argues that the fear of sophistic argument can explain hostility without relying solely on those suspicions.
- It makes sense to charge for training someone else’s sons or horses because the student’s sponsor receives the benefit.
- Socrates distinguishes that paid education from his own activity of persuading Athenians, which he says he performed without payment.
- He rejects exile partly because he does not want to travel from city to city as the sophists do.
- The Greek word timē can mean honor, price, worth, or a fitting sentence in a criminal trial.
- Socrates argues that his service to Athens deserves free meals in the Prytaneum, a public honor given to people who benefited the city.
- After that proposal risks sounding like mockery to the jury, Socrates offers a fine backed by friends including Plato and Crito.
- Socrates argues that death or a fine need not harm him, since he doubts that either outcome is truly bad.
- Stone highlights the tension that jurors may commit an injustice by imposing a penalty they believe is harmful.
- By disrupting the penalty process, Socrates may interfere with how Athens reproduces its political practices, raising doubts about whether his conduct benefits the city.
Transcript excerpt
0:02 Okay, hello. Um Is that good? Okay. Um So, there's three kind of interconnected questions I want to talk about today. Um And so, they're interconnected, so I won't necessarily be able to talk about them one after the other, but um the first one is Does Socrates teach?
0:52 I reason I put teach in quotes is that um as you probably I should come to expect by now, a lot of it's going to turn on the question of what different things teaching can mean. Right? What different things you could mean by that? Um and in some sense, the answer is going to be no, but at least according to Socrates himself, in some sense, the answer is going to be no, but it seems like according to Socrates himself, in some other sense, the answer is yes. So, the second question is Does Socrates benefit the city?
1:46 Or has he benefited the city? Um and there again, obviously, it's going to depend on what you mean by benefit. Um Like if to benefit something means to make it better, maybe that's one of the things it means. So, [snorts] in that case it would depend on what you mean by better. Um And the third thing is I don't know exactly how to phrase this, but it's something like Does he behave correctly at his trial? Does he behave
2:40 as some might say justly at his trial? Um And again, obviously uh the answer is going to depend on exactly what we mean by behaving correctly or behaving justly for that matter cuz remember, it's not clear what justice is. I think um Well, first of all, as I said, Aristotle is full of discussions of the many different things that words can mean. Um and uh
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Summary, takeaways, and chapters were generated by AI from the video's transcript and may contain errors. The video belongs to its creator, Abraham Stone.