The Death of Socrates and the Life of Philosophy PDF Download

Author: Peter J. Ahrensdorf
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791426333
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Shows that the dialogue in Plato's Phaedo is primarily devoted to presenting Socrates' final defense of the philosophical life against the theoretical and political challenge of religion.

Author: Emily R. Wilson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674026834
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Socrates's death in 399 BCE has figured largely in our world, shaping how we think about heroism and celebrity, religion and family life, state control and individual freedom--many of the key coordinates of Western culture. Wilson analyzes the enormous and enduring power the trial and death of Socrates has exerted over the Western imagination.

Author: Jean Paul Mongin
Publisher: Diaphanes
ISBN: 9783037345443
Category : Philosophers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"'Tell us, Delphic Oracle, who is the wisest man in all of Greece?' So begins The Death of Socrates. No mortal man is wiser than Socrates, who, on his daily walks through Athens, talks to all the people he meets. When the person he talks to takes himself to be very wise, Socrates asks so many questions that the person ends up admitting he knows nothing. When he runs into people who know little, Socrates sets them on the way to wisdom. But not everyone shares Socrates's love for the truth. When the people of Athens put him on trial for his ceaseless questioning, how will he find the courage to continue to speak the truth?" from publisher's website.

Author: Peter J. Ahrensdorf
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791426340
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Shows that the dialogue in Plato's Phaedo is primarily devoted to presenting Socrates' final defense of the philosophical life against the theoretical and political challenge of religion.

Author: Costica Bradatan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472525825
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
What do Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Jan Patocka have in common? First, they were all faced one day with the most difficult of choices: stay faithful to your ideas and die or renounce them and stay alive. Second, they all chose to die. Their spectacular deaths have become not only an integral part of their biographies, but are also inseparable from their work. A "death for ideas" is a piece of philosophical work in its own right; Socrates may have never written a line, but his death is one of the greatest philosophical best-sellers of all time. Dying for Ideas explores the limit-situation in which philosophers find themselves when the only means of persuasion they can use is their own dying bodies and the public spectacle of their death. The book tells the story of the philosopher's encounter with death as seen from several angles: the tradition of philosophy as an art of living; the body as the site of self-transcending; death as a classical philosophical topic; taming death and self-fashioning; finally, the philosophers' scapegoating and their live performance of a martyr's death, followed by apotheosis and disappearance into myth. While rooted in the history of philosophy, Dying for Ideas is an exercise in breaking disciplinary boundaries. This is a book about Socrates and Heidegger, but also about Gandhi's "fasting unto death" and self-immolation; about Girard and Passolini, and self-fashioning and the art of the essay.

Author: Plato
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description

Author: Jill Gordon
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271039770
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Acknowledging the powerful impact that Plato's dialogues have had on readers, Jill Gordon shows how the literary techniques Plato used function philosophically to engage readers in doing philosophy and attracting them toward the philosophical life. The picture of philosophical activity emerging from the dialogues, as thus interpreted, is a complex process involving vision, insight, and emotion basic to the human condition rather than a resort to pure reason as an escape from it. Since the literary features of Plato's writing are what draw the reader into philosophy, the book becomes an argument for the union of philosophy and literature--and against their disciplinary bifurcation--in the dialogues. Gordon construes the relationship of Plato's text to its audience as an analogue of Socrates' relationship with his interlocutors in the dialogues, seeing both as fundamentally dialectic. On this insight she builds her detailed analysis of specific literary devices in chapters on dramatic form, character development, irony, and image-making (which includes myth, metaphor, and analogy). In this way Gordon views Plato as not at all the enemy of the poets and image-makers that previous interpreters have depicted. Rather, Gordon concludes that Plato understands the power of words and images quite well. Since they, and not logico-deductive argumentation, are the appropriate means for engaging human beings, he uses them to great effect and with a sensitive understanding of human psychology, wary of their possible corrupting influences but ultimately willing to harness their power for philosophical ends.

Author: Sarah Kofman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801435515
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Socrates is an flusive figure, Sarah Kofman asserts, and he is necessarily so since he did not write or directly state his beliefs. Kofman suggests that Socrates' avowal of ignorance was meant to be ironic. Later philosophers who interpreted his text invariably resisted the profoundly ironic character of his way of life and diverged widely in their interpretations of him. Kofman focuses especially on the views of Plato, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.

Author: Ferit Guven
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 0791483568
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Ferit Güven illuminates the historically constitutive roles of madness and death in philosophy by examining them in the light of contemporary discussions of the intersection of power and knowledge and ethical relations with the other. Historically, as Güven shows, philosophical treatments of madness and death have limited or subdued their disruptive quality. Madness and death are linked to the question of how to conceptualize the unthinkable, but Güven illustrates how this conceptualization results in a reduction to positivity of the very radical negativity these moments represent. Tracing this problematic through Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, and, finally, in the debate on madness between Foucault and Derrida, Güven gestures toward a nonreducible, disruptive form of negativity, articulated in Heidegger's critique of Hegel and Foucault's engagement with Derrida, that might allow for the preservation of real otherness and open the possibility of a true ethics of difference.

Author: Kevin M. Crotty
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0739144081
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The Philosopher's Song explores the complex and fruitful relation between the great poets of Greek culture and Plato's invention of philosophy, especially as this bears on Plato's treatment of justice. The author shows how the poets helped shape the development of Plato's thinking throughout the course of his philosophical career.