Platos Socrates Magrini

When contemplating the origins of philosophical paideia one is tempted to think of Socrates, perhaps because we feel that Socrates has been a philosophical educator to us all. But it is Plato and his literary genius that we have to thank as his dialogues preserve not just Socratic philosophy, but also the Socratic educational experience. Educators would do well to better understand Plato's pedagogical objectives in the Socratic dialogues so that we may appreciate and utilize them in our own educational endeavors, and so that we may adapt the Socratic experience to new interactive educational technologies. Plato designed his Socratic dialogues to arm students for real world challenges and temptations. First, in both form and function the dialogues attempt to replicate the Socratic experience for their audience. They demand from their readers what Socrates demanded from his students: active learning, self-examination, and an appreciation for the complexity and importance of wisdom. Second, the dialogues challenge the conflation of professional and personal excellence, best exemplified by sophists such as Hippias, and exhort their reader to pursue personal aretê separately from and alongside practical and professional skills or technai. Third, they aim not to transmit some prepackaged formula for success, but to teach students to learn for themselves; that is to love and pursue wisdom. The Socratic dialogues, and philosophic dialogue itself, are educationally important in that they teach us to be philosophers in the literal sense.

Educational Philosophy and Theory

Incorporating Gadamer and other thinkers from the continental tradition, this essay is a close and detailed hermeneutic, phenomenological, and ontological study of the dialectic practice of Plato's Socrates--it radicalizes and refutes the Socrates-as-teacher model that educators from scholar academic ideology embrace.

Plato’s main pedagogical task is to convey Socrates’ knowledge of virtue (arētē) to others, for he embodied the truth that “the good life, the beautiful life, and the just life are the same” (Crito 48b7). A difficulty immediately presents itself, however, for Socrates’ conception of virtue was paradoxical: he claimed that it was a form of knowledge but that it could not be taught. This paper argues that Plato overcomes this challenge, effectively “teaching” the un-teachable, by creating the “myth of Socrates.” The knowledge of virtue is not a craft (technē), but rather a harmony of word and deed (phronēsis). Through the dialogues, Plato develops the story or myth (muthos) of Socrates’ virtuous life. The myth of Socrates is a mimetic representation of a moral exemplar, in which the student recognizes himself and the knowledge of virtue always already contained in his soul (anamnēsis). This knowledge is transformed into deeds through mimetic participation. The paper closes by making gestures towards the pedagogical strategy of the Republic, as well as its condemnation of mimetic poetry, in light of the analysis of the myth of Socrates. As much of the interpretation of Plato drawn upon in the analysis is Hans-Georg Gadamer’s, the paper can also be read as a condensation of many of his hermeneutical insights, drawn together through the myth motif.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the ongoing use of dialogue as a modern pedagogical and andragogical method. The author reviewed 18 scholarly sources from three education databases in this literature review. The use of dialogue as mode of instruction dates from the Socratic Method of 399 B.C.E. to present uses. The literature reveals current studies of successful use in math, ESL, business, law, and teacher preparation instruction. Also, the dialogue as avenue into reflective self-learning appears prominently in modern practice. Multimedia, computer, and online dialogue methods also show good results in several well designed models. The author concludes that dialogue in different forms remains an effective method of instruction in wide applications. The research revealed several improvements and new applications for dialogue as method of education from Socrates in ancient Greece to public elementary, secondary, and postsecondary institutions in 2009. KEYWORDS: Dialogue, Socrates, Socratic Method, Andragogy

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2015

This paper discusses the myriad of pedagogy enacted and/or discussed by Socrates within Plato's dialogues. Methodologies including dialectics, elaboration by example, allegories, analogies, imagery, story telling, recollection, and thoughtful inquiry scattered throughout the dialogues. Educators spend time on "the what" of teaching while "the how" to engage, enlighten, and nurture the love of learning and desire to know is often ignored. This paper provides explicit examples of Socrates teaching and connects his pedagogy to present-day instructional strategies that promote relevance and meaning within the context of contemporary teaching and learning.

Journal of Classics Teaching, Cambridge University Press, 2018

Is it possible to teach philosophy to first-year philosophy students in a way similar to the one Socrates used to teach his interlocutors in the early dialogues? Socrates conducted challenging discussions in agora of Athens, he began with examining everyday routine concepts, subjected his interlocutors to scrutiny―ἒλεγχος―showed the contradictions in their thinking, and often finally arrived at both his and their ignorance. The starting point of this paper is whether is it possible to teach Socratic philosophy following the Socratic Method. Here, we defend this possibility based on our practical experience of teaching Plato’s Euthyphro to first-year students. In particular, the first author taught three groups of first-year philosophy students, for three semesters―Autumn 2016, Spring and Autumn 2017―in the Department of Philosophy at ATU (Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran). The paper is organized in four parts. The first part looks at the importance of this project for learning philosophy in general. The second part focuses on the prerequisites of this project in terms of familiarity with the historical and cultural atmosphere of Classical Greece. Then, the third part describes the practical details of teaching and management of this class teaching. Finally the last part analyses precisely the outcomes of this project on the basis of our experience, both in regard to Euthyphro as a “Socratic” dialogue on the one hand, and also as a dialogue on the subject-matter of “piety”, on the other hand.

Meno is a Platonic dialogue in which Socrates, Meno, one of the slave-boys and Anytus inquire into the nature of virtue (areté-excellence) in relation to knowledge (ἐπιστήμη, epistēmē). Meno, a young aristocrat from Thessaly, asks Socrates how virtue is acquired, a question with presumed answers (a) Teaching (b) Learning (c) Practice (d) Nature(e) Any other way. However, Socrates is not used to such questions with ready-made answers, instead, in his Socratic astuteness, he changes the question from the ‘How’ to the ‘What’ of virtue. Within the Meno-Socratic definition struggle, Plato embraces the elenchus not as a negative tool to paralyze typical Socratic interlocutors, but as a positive tool that works in the framework of the hypothesis to stimulate rational inquiry. In this paper I discuss, (a)Virtue & Knowledge; (b) Paradox, Recollection & Immortal Soul; (c) teachability of virtue, and (d) I conclude by arguing that despite a deadlock in defining 'virtue', Socrates identifies it with a kind of knowledge as opposed to opinion.

In this paper, I explore three autobiographical narratives that Plato’s Socrates tells: his report of his conversations with Diotima (Symposium 201d–212b), his account of his testing of the Delphic oracle (Apology 21a–23a), and his description of his turn fromnaturalistic philosophy to his own method of inquiry (Phaedo 96a–100b).1 This Platonic Socrates shows his auditors how to philosophize for the future through a narrative recollection of his own past. In these stories, Plato presents us with an image of a Socrates who prepares others to do philosophy without him. In doing so, Plato’s Socrates exhibits philosophical care for his students. In the first part of the paper, I briefly discuss Socrates’ overall narrative style as Plato depicts it in the five dialogues that Socrates narrates. I then analyze each of these autobiographical accounts with an eye toward uncovering what they reveal about Plato’s presentation of Socrates’ philosophical practice.2 Finally, I offer a brief description of what it might mean to practice philosophy as care for self and care for others in a Socratic fashion.