 We are going to be continuing the discussion of archetypal figures in Hellenistic philosophy, specifically Socrates of Athens. This piece of artwork is from a study that Raphael made for that famous painting of the School of Athens. Now that they've uncovered some studies and drawings he did for it, the incredible detail, he went into it and just read this fascinating article about it, and the way that he represents Socrates' ugliness in this, which you don't really get when you're taking in the whole picture that has something like 40 different philosophers in it. But he brings out this, like, one character trait that we can actually say with some definitiveness we know about Socrates, that the guy was ugly. And he said that we actually have this story that goes back to a dialogue, a Socratic dialogue, written by somebody in the fourth century who probably knew Socrates, but wasn't Plato, wasn't Xenophon, wasn't Aristotle, wasn't one of these better names. But he tells this story about Socrates and sort of his friends being visited by a person who's trained in physiognomy. And physiognomy is the science, or rather pseudoscience, of being able to identify things about people's personality from aspects of their appearance. And so this physiognomist named Zopyrus shows up, he looks at Socrates, and he makes a diagnosis that this person must be very stupid, you can tell by the way his neck is shaped, and you can also tell that he's immoderate and addicted to women. And all of Socrates' friends laugh at this and say, this is ridiculous, you don't know what you're talking about, and obviously this physiognomy stuff is bullshit and a pseudoscience, because Socrates has more self-control than anyone. And he's the wisest person in Greece, so that shows that you're wrong. And then Socrates, however, intervenes and comes to the defense of the physiognomist and he says, no, it's true, I am totally addicted to women and immoderate, only because of my cultivated virtue that I am able to overcome those intense desires. And yes, naturally I'm stupid, but it's only because of my concerted efforts that I have become wiser than other people. And it's a wonderful story which actually touches on some deep issues about fate and about virtue and vice and science and other things, and Socrates is at the center of this story, but none of it probably ever happened. It's probably just a literary fiction that was designed to amuse or maybe even just to sell books. And it's a good introduction to what we call the Socratic problem, or the Socratic question, that's a scholarly term. And the problem arises from the following set of facts. First, Socrates wrote nothing. He did a lot of philosophy, but he didn't write anything. And he didn't found a school of his own. So practically all of the things that we associate and he denied that he ever did any teaching. So the things that we most associate with philosophy now, writing books and teaching, Socrates did none of them, and yet he's considered the paradigm of a philosopher. Furthermore, immediately after his death he became the subject of an entire new genre of literature called the Socratic Dialogue. So writing stories about Socrates interacting with his friends and enemies and people like Zopyrus and Alcibiades and so forth became a general thing that lots of different people wrote dialogues about. And there are at least a dozen known authors of Socratic Dialogues. And most of these, however, have not survived or survived only in fragments or reports like the one I just shared with you. Although Plato's and Xenophon's Socratic Dialogues do survive and I'll say a little bit more about those in due course. The problem deepens because the way that these writers of Socratic Dialogues portray Socrates diverges and differs and the way what it represents as philosophical activity is being about and even the beliefs that he holds are different. And this is most pronounced with respect to his defense speech which he gave in court when he was answering charges of being corrupted on corrupting the youth and so forth and that he was ultimately executed for. So he apparently gave a speech in his own defense and both Plato and Xenophon give us representations of his defense speech or his apologia but they differ in crucial details. So the question arises which one of them is right or rather that question gives rise to a deeper question of how could we ever know what actually happened and these aren't just the literary fictions of these authors themselves. To what extent do they differ? Well, what's interesting is that they do overlap to some extent and so then we can make perhaps an assumption that where they overlap we've sort of triangulated facts about what really happened and then where they differ might be peculiarities of the matter due to Plato's or Xenophon's own agenda in representing Socrates. So that's not a very easy question to answer and what somebody who's serious about answering the question does is first of all gets these very easy to access texts, Xenophon's Apology and Socrates' Apology and compares them. And I've done this broken it down, broken Xenophon's down into about 15 different sections or so and it looks like seven or eight maybe have similarities but then the topics might be similar but the exact position represented differs the prediction used to make the point or the point within the speech in which it's made it's very complicated but it shows something about comparison of philosophical views but the problem remains, we cannot clearly take either one as being an historical document of what actually happened because Socrates didn't write it down as the speech that he gave extemporaneously at the time and we know that Xenophon and Plato have their own philosophical agendas and want to portray Socrates in certain ways in order to further those agendas and even within a single source, for example, Plato Socrates is portrayed as holding different views, in fact incompatible views For example, in the Gordius he's portrayed as completely rejecting hedonism the view that the purpose of life is pleasure whereas in the Protagoras he defends a form of hedonism in his argument So which is it? Was he a hedonist or wasn't he a hedonist? As I'll show later he gives rise to later schools which interpret him in connection with their own views So, for example, the Cyranaics who found their own hedonistic school and their founder was a member of the Socratic Circle take this idea of Socratic hedonism seriously and sort of run with it but then another school like that of Antipodes who influenced the cynics, who influenced the Stoics who reject hedonism, say, pleasure is worthless and has nothing to do with happiness in life whatsoever But it's all about virtue They will also claim some support in their even anti-hedonistic views from the views of Socrates Furthermore, that's just two examples of dogmatic schools one that holds that hedonism is true and is the basis of life and another that says pleasure is irrelevant to life and rejects hedonism those are both dogmatic positions that actually take a position on it but there's other people who are influenced by Socrates who say we don't take a position on whether hedonism is true or not and that was Socrates' position it was not to have a position on them but just to argue both positions out So there's even a meta level here on which people are influenced by Socrates and claim to be influenced by him claim to be working with Socratic methods and philosophy but to totally different purposes and ends that are incompatible So that is what we call the Socratic problem or the Socratic question I guess the question is what were his actual views and the problem is we can't ever figure out what those views are because we don't have a time machine all we have is later writers with their own agendas so we have to be aware of those contexts Now the earliest evidence for Socrates the very earliest by far is in the Comedian Aristophanes clouds which is the only source that we have about Socrates that was written in his own lifetime and it's incredibly negative and abusive it makes Socrates basically look like a clown and look like a horrible scourge and like he's actually corrupting the young and so forth and Plato depicts Socrates as rejecting this account in his apology and being aware that it has influenced and affected his reputation Now some people think that is the most accurate evidence about Socrates not only is it by far the earliest but that's probably what he was like For one thing his ugliness makes him perfect for comedy everybody laughs at people that are ugly in fact you make these comic exaggerations of ugliness in Greek comedy and you didn't really have to do the exaggerations in Socrates case that's sort of what he really looked like so he fit the bill in terms of the spectacle of it but also his unconventional views and unconventional lifestyle and so forth could easily be mocked and so on and so some people think that's probably our most accurate representation of him that we're ever going to get but in fact when you think about it a bit deeper the image that's made of Socrates in those works can't possibly be true because it's a composite image of three different types of intellectuals that existed in this time period not just one so one of these is of a sophist that means somebody who basically trained someone to be a lawyer or an attorney that is trained someone how to make worse arguments sound better than they really are that's one thing that he's portrayed as doing someone who can train you to beat anyone in court even if your arguments worse than your opponents another is that he's portrayed as being a sort of atheistic natural philosopher like Alex Agarus who denies the existence of traditional gods makes up his own and so on and the third is portraying him as an ascetic moral teacher who's totally indifferent to worldly matters and only cares about the state of his own soul and this sort of thing okay so because those are types that we have very many other representatives of and we can attach names like Alex Agarus and Gorgias and Diogenes and so forth to these various character types and then see the way that they've been consolidated into one character in the comedic brilliance of Aristophanes and that it isn't anything like a biographical representation of an individual but rather a kind of sketch and for obvious purposes Socrates fits the bill now the later evidence for Socrates comes down in the first place to Plato who is the first person to produce an entire corpus of philosophy well actually the first person to do that was Democritus but since none of those works have survived we can't assess its unity and so forth as a corpus so the oldest one to survive are the works of Plato and the dialogues of Plato which have dramatic settings named characters and these characters exchange speeches debating about philosophical topics and all of Plato's genuine works except the very last work and longest work that he wrote called the Laws in all of the rest of Plato's work Socrates is a character and in most of them he's the main character and Plato was a pupil of Socrates he was in the circle of Socrates and he vigorously defends Socrates' views but he also uses Socrates as a kind of literary puppet to represent his own views and his own arguments and that's related to the Socratic problem I introduced before and so Socrates is portrayed as defending incompatible views as I said about hedonism for example and that's just so in order to further local philosophical debates that Plato is pursuing in those various dialogues and Plato isn't trying to come up with an overall systematic account and coherent account of Socrates' philosophy now other than Plato there's also the Xenophon who wrote an extensive work called Memoirs of Socrates which as I mentioned before includes an Apollegia or defense speech of Socrates and he like Plato was a pupil of Socrates and a member of his inner circle his work even more so than Plato seems entirely designed to defend Socrates against the charges that were brought against him so to portray Socrates is not being someone who's an atheistic natural philosopher who invents false gods but it makes him seem as somebody who's devoutly religious, pious and believes that intelligent design, creationism explains everything in the natural world and we don't need naturalistic philosophy and so forth and to defend charges against corrupting the youth it shows him being very concerned with the education of the youth and so on and so on Furthermore Xenophon is at least partly dependent on Plato this is another complication of comparing their accounts is that we can't tell that even where there's a similarity that that is like I was saying triangulating a fact about what actually happened it could be that the similarity is due to Xenophon picking up on a good point or a good nice rhetorical move that Plato had made and incorporating it into his own work and then there are other testimonies about Socrates that aren't reducible to either of these sources or to Aristophanes reports that we find in Aristotle and then of course in today's reading the account of Socrates in Diogenes Laertes which gives us a biography and goes through a lot of the points on this slide that I won't go into detail there are some questions about his exact birthday there are some descriptions of his illustrious military career which are mostly meant to show him manifesting the virtue of courage there is a question about his education there are many people that he's that are said to be to have been his teacher in Diogenes Laertes Diogenes Laertes does not mention the person who Socrates is made to say is his teacher in the symposium which is a female philosopher named Diotima who somebody recently suggested is actually a mask for Aspacia who was a leading female intellectual and Solon's companion I'm sorry Pericles' companion a politician during the democratic period in Athens Now Socrates of course had this enormous reputation for wisdom and apparently even the Delphic Oracle was consulted about who was the wisest person in Greece and it was said that no one is wiser than Socrates there are reports about his marriage or his marriages so he either had one or two wives and there is this suggestion in various other reports that he also had girlfriends possibly including Aspacia there is his involvement in politics and civic affairs the way that he conducted himself on trials and so forth he is portrayed as criticizing both democrats and oligarchs he's portrayed as being essentially the first urban individual in history somebody who never leaves the city of Athens he's once portrayed in Plato as leaving the city walls to go sit under a tree and talk about philosophy otherwise everything he does is in the middle of town and in the workshops and the citadels and sanctuaries within Athens he mentored several controversial people the most controversial being by these but lots of other people who went on to political careers and whose political fortunes and reputations went up and down and with them in a way Socrates who was portrayed as being responsible for these people Dysius Larisius also mentions his refusal to accept payment for teaching and his refusal to claim or admit that he was a professional teacher of any subject Dysius Larisius also gives us some details about his trial, the conviction and his execution by drinking hemlock and Dysius Larisius doesn't mention this but it's a fact about Socrates is that he becomes this emblem of all of philosophy and gets made into a kind of philosophical martyr somebody who died for the cause of philosophy and then a paradigm of the philosophical sage again as we'll see throughout the Hellenistic period certainly and then he is compared to figures like Confucius and Jesus as being you know essentially starting a moral revolution in his own environment through his teachings and so on even though all of the people I just mentioned probably never wrote anything Now let's look at a little bit more detail about the charges that were brought against Socrates because this seems to have some external validity by all accounts he was charged that really was a child what was he supposed to be guilty of needless curiosity meddling interference and inquiring into things beneath the earth and in the sky and also on the surface of the earth that's one charge not a very clear charge a fairly vague charge but it looks like basically a description of philosophical activity second making the weak argument stronger and teaching other people to do the same the charge that's always leveled against Sofis now you can make big money doing this in law school but back then it was kind of a considered a kind of shady enterprise then another set of charges that we have a name attached to them somebody who supposedly was the actual prosecutor in the case Melodis Socrates is supposed to have been guilty of corrupting the youth and again that may have been connected to controversial people that he mentored like Elcibiades but also impiety and irreligion not acknowledging the God the city the gods the city acknowledges but creating and making up new divinities of his own and there was some great portrayals in artwork of the outcome of that trial which was that he was found guilty and ordered to drink hemlock so he was executed here's an 18th century the most famous piece in your Metropolitan Art Museum here is a really you should look at these slides when you have some more time they incorporate literary elements from plateaus and xenophons accounts into these depictions of what the other people were doing and what the prison looked like and so forth now go back to the Delphic Oracle for a moment because the Delphic Oracle and his response to it seems to have been part of his problem so this friend of Socrates named Charophon consulted the Oracle at Delphi the Oracle as a prophetic Oracle located in this temple in central Greece it has an inscription over it that says know thyself which becomes maybe the most important ethical prescription even in Greek philosophy and Charophon asked this Oracle is there anyone wiser than Socrates and the answer was no no one is wiser than Socrates but if Socrates doesn't teach rhetoric like logic how to make the worst argument sound better and so forth and he doesn't teach natural science then the question is why did he get a reputation for wisdom so on the next couple of slides I'm going to give some aspects of his philosophy that we gather from these later sources and try to characterize the views that he became most famous for now the most important is perhaps just the portrayal of him doing philosophy and so the activity of philosophy uncompromising devotion to ethical inquiry so talking to everybody that you meet and trying to get to the bottom of what they're doing and whether it's right or wrong whether they're living their life well or not and so one thing he says in the defense speech is that the unexamined life isn't worth living for a human being and so you should examine not only your own life but help other people examine their and this is kind of what his activity was about let's talk about your problems let's figure out what it is and let's examine your life he describes himself, or at least Plato hasn't described himself in the Theatetus as a gadfly that's constantly bugging the cow of Athens and making it making it improve itself and also describes the effect that he has as being like a stingray who stuns his opponents and they're sort of dumbfounded and babble in his presence and can't get their arguments together and are made to contradict themselves another image that he's made to present himself with is being not a teacher but a so-called intellectual midwife who helps ideas that are nourished within the pupil helps bring them to life it's not a model of a student as an empty vessel that you pour knowledge into but instead it's a more organic conception where the student themselves is producing these ideas and so forth and that Socrates will help bring those things into viability so that they can survive as ideas and grow into something more important and more formidable and he's associated with the Socratic method what we call the Socratic method which literally just means something like reputation a method of examining and refuting various positions proceeding by question and answer one way to think of what he's doing here is a kind of hypothesis testing you the student proposes some answer to a question then you ask them a series of questions about what that answer presupposes until you elicit a contradiction in their view and so then think that that answer can't be correct then move on to the next hypothetically correct answer and the one that's left standing after this process of refutation and examination will be the view that you take to be most true there's also what we call Socratic irony although it's difficult to say exactly what that means but it has to do with the statement that the oracle at Delphi is correct that he is the wisest person in Athens and he is the wisest person in Athens because he knows that he doesn't know anything whereas other people wander around thinking that they know stuff when they don't actually know anything Socrates at least knows that he doesn't know anything therefore he knows something therefore he is wiser than all of those people who don't know but an aspect of the irony of this position is that it professes to intellectual humility I don't know anything and yet Socrates never loses an argument he always takes his opponent apart in these portrayals in the Socratic dialogues so it's always his opponent is shown to be ignorant thinking that they had knowledge like Euthyphro thinking he knows what piety is or Thracymachus thinking he knows what justice is and then being shown that no you don't and you're contradicting yourself and your views are all incompatible with them and so this is what seems to make it ironic is that it is at once intellectually humble thing to say and at the same time a very arrogant thing to say that my intellectual humility makes me a lot smarter than you and a lot better at this than you are there is also the fact of his rejection of natural inquiry and his focus on the search for definition standards of material only of moral virtues and his kind of discouragement of getting involved in all this logic chopping and trying to figure out what nature is and so forth and wanting you to focus on his vision of philosophy and so possibly if he's correct about this the only time you're really doing philosophy is when you get together with a small group of people in person and debate about the definition of some moral virtue and courage or justice and you keep trying to figure that out that's what philosophy is in his view in order to match some question does the subject himself can predict the logic of his purpose answer? well he doesn't himself offer an answer to the question right? he asks the question an answer is given by somebody who supposes that they know and then a series of questions are asked about the implications of that answer that show the view to be incoherent and that they shouldn't be holding that if they know it and so this method can be employed without any commitment to any view whatsoever any example on this case to see that for instance how or justice what question he asked and what was the answer to the contradiction? yes so for that you need to read the republic a 10 book work by Plato depicting him doing that an easier way to get a sample of it would be to look at a small work like the youth of fro where the question is what is piety or holiness and Socrates runs into a guy who says I'm a professor of religious studies about religion I can explain it to anyone what do you want to know and Socrates says well I want to know what holiness actually is and he goes through a series of bad answers like oh it's what I'm doing now or it's what's favored by the gods or it's what's favored by some of the gods or it's doing service to the gods and all of these are shown to be incoherent what holiness is or else it doesn't make any sense and the dialogue ends in confusion, perplexity in what we in Greek call operia so it looks like a totally negative result but progress is made because before you read the dialogue you thought somebody must know what this concept means you might even think you know what it means you're doing the right kinds of sacrifices or whatever or it's whatever god likes whatever god says he wants to happen in the bible that's what holiness is but then you read the dialogue and you go through this kind of refutative method and you realize those answers don't make any sense and so then you realize I don't really know what this means I don't understand what this is further inquiry is necessary perhaps there isn't any meaning and it's a meaningless concept so there is still intellectual progress made without any commitment being made to a position in fact what you're doing is destroying commitment to positions where it shouldn't have been held because it was held without an actual rational basis is that equally as good at persuading if it was that's a curious thing because are any examples given where that's stated so this is like on my page 11 in section 29 he showed equal ability in both directions persuading and dissuading men thus after conversing with the atheists about knowledge he sent him away as Plato says, fired with the divine impulse but when Euthyphro had indicted his father for manslaughter Socrates after some conversation with him on piety diverted him from this purpose so there it's making it as if he had this effect on actual action Euthyphro was going to prosecute his father for murdering a slave or something and saying he was doing it on the basis of it's the holy and pious thing to do to prosecute your father if they do something wrong but Socrates shows that you don't even know what you're talking about with holiness and you're not even making any sense and so he's discouraged from acting on that and whereas he encouraged by inspiring Theotetus to look further into the question of what is knowledge but that's an odd way to describe the results of those dialogues so that's Diogenes Laertes is making the point based on the dialogue Theotetus a dialogue addressed to the issue of what is knowledge a dialogue that ends in confusion, perplexity in our career about the question of what is knowledge it's not just a true account it's not just a justified true account it's not just a justified true belief what is it? we thought we knew going ahead somebody must know what knowledge is but we read the dialogue and we realized there's all these problems with any definition we attempt to give of it that's yet to be solved in philosophy and the other dialogue he's referring to is the youth, the one about piety again it doesn't end in a persuasion he doesn't say let me persuade you not to prosecute your father it ends in confusion and perplexity about what piety or holiness really is and that confusion or perplexity may have an indirect effect of encouraging or discouraging action but that is a sort of incidental result of this activity which is a purely intellectual inquiry into the definitions of these ethical concepts excuse me I just would like to know that the dialectic method that Hegel talks about is the same as the one that Socrates founded? well I don't know to answer that we'd have to read a couple thousand pages of Hegel which you're welcome to do because we have courses on it but dialectic in the way I'm using it right now essentially means conversation having a conversation having a question and answer format of an exchange like we're doing right now this is dialectic but what this dialectical method does is elicits contradictions and you start asking me questions and you say well but doesn't Socrates you said before that Socrates isn't that and it turns out I don't know what I'm talking about and I'm contradicting myself and none of these facts come here with each other then we're really doing that's a dialectical examination of what I'm saying or if one of you had a view about justice or about piety and we examined it then that would be doing dialectic or doing philosophy but the word itself just means conversation and answer now here are some positive aspects however I think we can take away so as I've said these inquiries into what is piety, what is knowledge what is justice, what is virtue although they result in operia or confusion or perplexity that nonetheless is a positive result so we can set up a research agenda to figure out all of these other attempts to define justice for example defining it as helping friends and hurting enemies or repaying debts two of the definitions of justice considered in the republic we realize those aren't going to work so we need something else like distributing to each person in accordance with their worth or something like that or we need to distinguish between multiple kinds of justice like distributive justice versus corrective justice or retributive justice or something like that or we need to distinguish between multiple kinds of virtue, intellectual virtue and moral virtue and then we can get clear on what these things are so the first step in order to make progress is to make sure you get rid of the garbage input into the process so that you can clear that away and operate on the basis of what's solid and perhaps build a better theory and so Socrates does start that because apparently prior to him doing all of this everybody just went around acting like they knew what all these things were and we don't have record of there being a kind of systematic attempt to examine and define these things prior to this now here are some very positive views that I think can with some confidence be attributed to him intellectualism the thesis that the virtues and by virtues I mean things like courage, self-control, justice and so forth they are just forms of knowledge like justice is knowing what is right and wrong and courage is knowing what should be feared and what should not and so on it approaches to other crafts like architecture and medicine and the way that these are able to achieve definite results and we try to think of morality along a similar lines that in other words lines that we can break down what architects do into different elements and smaller pieces and have a rational account of how they're able to build a structure that protects us against weather and intruders or preserves our health disease. We can give a rational account of all that happens, how all that happens. Can we also give a similar kind of rational technical account of how somebody becomes good or bad or just or unjust or holy or unholy? And then a thesis about unity of the virtues. Since each of the individual virtues are just kinds of knowledge, they're all forms of wisdom and one is either wise or isn't wise. If one is wise then it seems one will possess all of the virtues but if one lacks any particular virtue then one is not wise and is thought to lack all virtues. Now that's actually a fairly paradoxical view and as I'll show in a moment a way to think about talk is to think about a number of paradoxes that he generates relative to our unexamined beliefs. I just want to really briefly touch on his influence on the later history of philosophy. First of all the most important thematic influence I've already emphasized getting philosophy focused on practical ethical matters as Cicero puts it, calling philosophy down from the heavens, not trying to explain the shape and order of the cosmos but what's going on within our own households and between us and our friends and that sort of thing. Previously stuff that we call philosophy had centered on nature and natural explanation like in Democritus, like we saw in part in Democritus and in his predecessors like Empedocles, Annexagoras, Anneximines and so on, Thales, Empedocles. Modern scholarship follows the ancients leads in referring to philosophers that operate before Socrates as being pre-Socratic philosophers and so we actually make this division between philosophers that came before Socrates and those that came after because of this sea change in philosophical method that he affects but the term is actually a really bad one and we should get rid of it and I shouldn't have even mentioned it to you. It includes Democritus even though Democritus was not chronologically prior to Socrates, they were actually almost exact contemporaries and Democritus as we saw did not focus just on natural science but wrote a great deal on ethics and had a great subsequent influence on ethics and so the term pre-Socratics is misleading. Now the immediate circle of Socrates will be looking further into each of these people. I've already said some things about Plato, Aristipus of Cyrene, will be looking at at the end of this week, founded a hedonist school known as the Cyrenaics, Antisthenes of Athens inspired the cynic movement via Diogenes of Sinov and somebody who we won't be looking much further into because it's almost entirely concerned with logic and paradoxes, euclides of Megara who founded a school known as the Oristics or Magarian School. Then his influence on later Hellenistic philosophy that Magarian school flourished and there were other works none of them fully intact but fragments. There were several phases of Plato's Academy including a new phase called the New Academy led by a character Arkesa Laos who will be reading some fragments about him who interpreted Socrates as being a strictly skeptical inquirer and he extended this so-called academic skepticism beyond the areas investigated by Socrates like ethics into logic and physics. The Cyrenaics as I've mentioned a flourishing school of hedonism, the cynics inspired by Antisthenes and Diogenes of Sinov who Aristotle calls a Socrates gone mad. The Stoics influenced via the cynics led by Zeno of Chidium they regarded Socrates as being a straight-up sage who knew what was good and bad for humans and lived his own life fully in accordance with it and actually his own lived his death in accordance with it and they assumed that he had a complete system of ethics worked out but that he didn't he wanted to elicit it from students themselves and bring it pedagogically out of them instead of this model again of empty vessels that you pour knowledge into and that's why he didn't express it in the form of treatises and so forth. That becomes the job of later Stoics who defend the unity of virtue, thesis and intellectualism and so forth and then try to prop that view up with dogmatic views about logic and nature. The one school uninfluenced by Socrates and who actually has hostile and negative invective to say about Socrates are the Epicureans. And so I've given you a bunch of divergent interpretations of Socrates if you look at the negative or hostile view of Aristophanes and compare it with the positive views of Plato and Xenophon or we could compare the conventional versus radical Socrates in Xenophon versus Plato or different representations of Socrates within Plato or Socrates' influence on his immediate circles hedonists and anti-hedonists and also his influence on both dogmatic schools like hedonists, anti-hedonists and skeptical influences like Antisthenes and like Carnades in the new Academy. And here's a summary of some Socratic paradoxes. No one desires anything that's bad. People only desire what's good. No one does anything wrong willingly or knowingly. It's impossible to do anything wrong willingly or knowingly. All virtue is just a kind of knowledge, if somebody is knowledgeable they are necessarily virtuous and if they are ignorant they're necessarily vicious. Virtue is both necessary and sufficient for happiness. If you have it you're happy. If you don't have it it's impossible for you to be happy. And my favorite rhetoric or training in speaking like they give you in law school is only useful for either indicting yourself if you do something wrong or your friends if they've done something wrong or helping your enemies escape punishment. That could be a useful thing to learn about in law school. Helping people you hate get off and be found not guilty of crimes they in fact committed.