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WillowOne's Positions

Apology

Overview

Plato's account of the speech Socrates gave in his own defence at his trial in Athens in 399 BCE, on charges of impiety and corrupting the young. Socrates explains that the Delphic oracle called him the wisest of men, that he set out to disprove this by questioning those who claimed to know things, and that he found they did not. He refuses to beg for his life, proposes that his punishment should be free dinners at public expense, and after being sentenced to death tells the jury that the unexamined life is not worth living. "Apology" here means defence, not regret.

Notes

Thirty pages, and the origin of the method I try to use: ask people what they mean, keep asking, and see whether the claim survives. Socrates' claim to know only that he knows nothing is the starting point of Fallibilism, and the trial itself is a standing reminder of what happens to people who make others feel foolish in public. The Street Epistemology community is doing, on street corners, roughly what got him killed.

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