Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Socrates: the epileptic dialectic
“So much of Platonic scholarship is brilliant hallucination of sufficient textual basis for secure inferences about the whole Socrates/Plato thing, to console us for the sheer bummer that is losing all that stuff.” - John Holbo
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/philosophy_were_people_helping_people_refute_people/
Professional philosophers don't miss the rest, in my experience. They should, but they won't even read Xenophon, very sadly. First because the social context that Socrates had to adapt his teaching to crystal clear there - Xenophon never writes a word that isn't intended to directly contradict one charge or other raised against Socrates. Second, because some bad arguments by Socrates, probably not badly mangled by Xenophon, slip through and tell us a great deal about how Socrates, as opposed to Plato, viewed the world.
But, to be somewhat acerbic about it, pro philosophers nowadays prefer to believe that Socrates was wearing a lab coat not a toga, and reading Xenophon gets in the way of that, rather.
Interesting recent biographical highlight:
We found textual evidence that his daimonion was probably a simple partial seizure (SPS) of temporal lobe origin. It was a brief voice that usually prohibited Socrates from initiating certain actions. It started when he was a child, and it visited Socrates unpredictably. Moreover, we found at least two descriptions of Socrates' unique behavior that are consistent with complex partial seizures (CPSs). The fact that Socrates had been experiencing both SPSs and CPSs periodically since childhood makes the diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) likely.
Epilepsia. 2006 Mar;47(3):652-4.
Socrates and temporal lobe epilepsy: a pathographic diagnosis 2,400 years later.
Muramoto O, Englert WG.
Department of Neurology, Kaiser Permanente Northwest Division, Portland, Oregon
PMID: (pubmed.com ID) 16529635
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=16529635
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/philosophy_were_people_helping_people_refute_people/
Professional philosophers don't miss the rest, in my experience. They should, but they won't even read Xenophon, very sadly. First because the social context that Socrates had to adapt his teaching to crystal clear there - Xenophon never writes a word that isn't intended to directly contradict one charge or other raised against Socrates. Second, because some bad arguments by Socrates, probably not badly mangled by Xenophon, slip through and tell us a great deal about how Socrates, as opposed to Plato, viewed the world.
But, to be somewhat acerbic about it, pro philosophers nowadays prefer to believe that Socrates was wearing a lab coat not a toga, and reading Xenophon gets in the way of that, rather.
Interesting recent biographical highlight:
We found textual evidence that his daimonion was probably a simple partial seizure (SPS) of temporal lobe origin. It was a brief voice that usually prohibited Socrates from initiating certain actions. It started when he was a child, and it visited Socrates unpredictably. Moreover, we found at least two descriptions of Socrates' unique behavior that are consistent with complex partial seizures (CPSs). The fact that Socrates had been experiencing both SPSs and CPSs periodically since childhood makes the diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) likely.
Epilepsia. 2006 Mar;47(3):652-4.
Socrates and temporal lobe epilepsy: a pathographic diagnosis 2,400 years later.
Muramoto O, Englert WG.
Department of Neurology, Kaiser Permanente Northwest Division, Portland, Oregon
PMID: (pubmed.com ID) 16529635
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=16529635
