The Dialogue Of Platos Alcibiades 1 Socrates - amazonia.fiocruz.br

Navigation menu

By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Cookie PolicyPrivacy Policyand our Terms of Service. Philosophy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for those interested in the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. It only takes a minute to sign up. For example, Did Socrates really meet Zeno in Parmenides as a young man and the conversation that took place between them was recorded by Plato?

Both of the answers are correct to point out that the dialogues are fictitious. It is extremely unlikely any section of any length is a transcript of an actual conversation between Socrates and anyone. This, however, should not surprise us because the idea of making dialogue in a written work a transcript is a modern concept. No one would have done so until well past CE. So in a sense, we need to split this into two parts. Cicero's speeches are also fictitious in that what we have recorded is not what he said but rather a highly polished version written well after the fact expressing what Cicero wanted to express.

Same with Julius Caesar and most other classical Greek and Roman writing.

But the ideas and thoughts contained therein are Cicero's or Julius Caesar's. Aristotle's Dialoue by and large appear to be an exception -- not as in they are transcripts but as in they seem to be unpolished lecture notes. Let's call this feature "polishing your memoirs. A more important thing to notice is that Plato's Socrates often functions as a mouthpiece for Plato and does not necessarily say what Socrates would have said. In Plato scholarship, dialogues are divided into early, middle, and late.

Your Answer

Early dialogues. My AOS is not Plato, but the basic gist is that early may be closer to what we believe Socrates himself might have done and said i. Let's call this "the Plato-washing of Socrates. Hence the meeting of Parmenides with a young Socrates, teaching Plato's theory of forms, cannot be historical. Even when the dialogues are fictitious, some of the interlocutors in Plato's dialogues are historical, e.

But we do not know, whether such a meeting actually took place and whether the participants hold their speeches as recorded by Plato. Usually Plato lets others express his own philosophical thoughts and claims, most notably Socrates. Plato's work with the highest probability for historical truth is the Apology, with the two speeches of Socrates. As JoWehler notes, the dialogues The Dialogue Of Platos Alcibiades 1 Socrates fictitious compositions, though often with real people, including, I believe, two of Plato' brothers in the Republic.

Some passages from Socrates can be compared with Xenophon's works, but it is good to remember that what we possess is only a tiny fragment of ancient writings, and I think it would be very difficult for scholars to cross-reference works and judge accuracy. Even the near-contemporary historians Herodotus and Thucydides, who ostensibly aimed for accuracy, are assumed to have partially fabricated public speeches they attribute to Alexander The Great Of Alexander IIi Of and other political leaders.

However, the period still bore many traces of oral culture. It is almost certain that the Greeks had far better memories for long speeches, poems, and dialogues than we do today. So it is possible that large chunks of dialogue were passed down with fewer errors than we might imagine. Grube, in Five Dialogues by Platoindicates that it's likely that the Apologyat least, is at least somewhat faithful to what Socrates actually said, given that Plato is believed to have written it not long after Socrates' trial, and it would have not gone over well had his account been drastically different from others' recollections of what Socrates had said.

It's worth The Dialogue Of Platos Alcibiades 1 Socrates that no less an authority than Plato's most famous pupil Aristotle classified his dialogs as "fiction. Plato's aim was to teach philosophy, not record history and he's on record as endorsing the alteration or wholesale invention of "facts" to suit philosophical or pedagogical goals. Since Plato himself does not appear as a character in his own dialogs, we can assume he's not recording conversations where he was himself present. In order for them to be accurate, therefore, Socrates would have needed to have accurately recounted these conversations to Plato, who would then have also needed to remember them accurately for in some cases quite a long period of time before writing them down.

This seems especially unlikely in light of Plato's aforementioned contempt for factual accuracy. Therefore, while Socrates likely would have had conversations with many of the people mentioned in the dialogues since they tend to have been well-known figures of a certain social status in a fairly small communitythe chances that those conversations were reproduced accurately are vanishingly small. The most likely exceptions to this general rule are the trial Apology and death Phaedo of Socrates.

In particular, the Apology was written relatively close to The Dialogue Of Platos Alcibiades 1 Socrates time of the event it depicts, and Plato would almost certainly have personally been in attendance. It's also one of the few of Plato's Socratic works that depicts an event also attested to by independent observers.]