- Title
- Introduction
- Creator
- Layne, Danielle A.; Tarrant, Harold
- Relation
- The Neoplatonic Socrates p. 1-19
- Relation
- http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15276.html
- Publisher
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2014
- Description
- In one of th emose romantic dialogues of his corpus, Plato depicts Socrates walking barefoot in the waters of the Ilissus, coyly tormented by a seemingly benign conundrum: "Who am I, and what are my intentions?" Turning to the handsome Phaedrus and admitting his real difficulty with his lack of self-knowledge, Socrates famously wonders whether he resembles "a monster more complicated and more furious than Typhon or a gentler and simpler creature, to whom a divine and quiet lot is given by nature." Unable to solve the problem immediately, Socrates spends the afternoon conversing with the boy on the nature of love, the soul, and the life of the philosopher and, in so doing, sets the question "Who is Socrates?" on the back burner. Yet, as we all know, years later, in a setting dramatically different from this meandering stroll on a hot summer day, this very same difficulty was readdressed before his peers and countrymen, the Athenians, and they replied rather forcefully, sentencing the philosopher to death for corrupting the youth.
- Subject
- Socrates; Neoplatonism
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1066317
- Identifier
- uon:18078
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780812246292
- Language
- eng
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