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Notes on video lecture:
Socrates and The Apology
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on August 15, 2015 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
life, troll, Euthyphro, revelation, prove, murder, exile, Miletus, religious, guilty, defender, loses, verbal, jury, court, wiser, seriously, soothsayer, unpopular, comedian
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what is Socrate's like?
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at the start of                   
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Socrates and Euthyphro meet outside the Archon Basileus'           
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Archon Basileus
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official in charge of overseeing                    matters in Athens
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holds hearings in cases of alleged, religious crime
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which is why Socrates and Euthyphro are before him on this day
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Euthyphro wants to charge his dad with             
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it isn't a clear case
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so it is an odd thing for a son to be going out of his way to do
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Socrates says he has been charged by a man named                with corrupting the youth and "making new gods"
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Euthyphro [Εὐθύφρων]
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sometimes described as a priest but is more of a                      or prophet
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thinks Socrates will resolve the issue
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instead Socrates            his case, gets sentenced to death, and dies
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The Apology
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             defense
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the two speeches Socrates gave at his own defense
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1. determination of guilt and evidence
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if guilty
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2. prosecution asks for a punishment,                  asks for another punishment
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the prosecutor asked for death, expecting Socrates to ask for            and expecting the jury to go for that
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instead, Socrates asked for free lunch for life at the cities expense
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was an honor given to athletes
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a          of 500 Athenians
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Socrates seems somewhat like a                 
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but on the other hand, he seems to be serious in the sense that he is questioning people for their own good
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he was willing to give his          for doing what he believed in
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he also had characteristics of a           
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one man's troll is another man's critical intellectual
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should we read The Apology                   , like stand-up comedy, or somewhere in between
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Socrates is argues about what many people in a trial think about
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this person must be              of something, thinking that innocent people don't end up in court
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explains what he was up to everyday which has led to him corrupting the youth
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the joke is
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a parody of a person who has received some religious                     
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question: is there any man            than Socrates
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Oracle says: no man is wiser than Socrates
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so Socrates tries to            the Oracle wrong but can't, as everyone else is like him, they don't know anything, but Socrates at least knows that he doesn't know
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but he is becoming                   , exposing other people as not knowing what they are talking about, in service to the Oracle

Ideas and Concepts:

On the healthy similarities between humor and seriousness, via this morning's Plato Dialogues class: "When I took my first philosophy course, I read Plato and I didn't much like it. One reason was that we read The Apology and the professor said it was a very serious dialogue dealing with the most serious of themes. And I thought to myself, did you miss the part where the guy asked for free lunch instead of the death penalty? Granted, the free lunch thing was actually an honor accorded to champion athletes and prominent citizens, so Socrates didn't just come up with it out of nowhere. He was asking to be honored in a traditional Athenian way, but still, this is a silly kind of punishment to ask for. The Apology struck me sort of like stand-up comedy, not laugh-out-loud funny, but funny-strange with a little dusting of funny-ha-ha on top, which is even more funny-strange under the circumstances, with Socrates' life on trial. People have compared Socrates to a satyr, to a marshal arts master, and to a game-player, but is he also like a comedian? Is he joking? Jokes are absurd, so all comedy involves contradiction but not all contradiction is comedy. Does Socrates regularly make jokes in addition to drawing out contradictions that people make? Normally, I like something if it is comedy, but in this case, it sort of confused me at first. I couldn't figure out to what extent Socrates was a comedian, and to what extent he was serious. And I began to think, perhaps that is something that is profound about the Apology."
Euthyphro and the Bad Dad
Plato, Socrates, Dialogues, and Masks
Alcibiades on Socrates
The Divided Line
Socrates and The Apology
Socrates' Approach to Argumentation