plato the trial and death of socrates hackett

So why is intellectual humility in such scarce supply? Of course, the quickest answer might be the right one: that humility runs against most people’s fear of being mistaken, and the zero-sum view that being right means someone else has to be totally wrong.īut we think that the problem is more complex and perhaps more interesting. In other words, Americans have stopped listening. Perhaps this white-knuckled insistence on being right is the root cause of the societal fissure – why everything seems so irreparably wrong.Īs religion and philosophy scholars, we would argue that our apparent national impasse points to a lack of “epistemic humility,” or intellectual humility – that is, an inability to acknowledge, empathize with and ultimately compromise with opinions and perspectives different from one’s own. Critics point out endless lists of what should be fixed: the complexity of the tax code, or immigration reform, or the inefficiency of government.īut each dilemma usually comes down to polarized deadlock between two competing visions and everyone’s conviction that theirs is the right one. Buchanan's learned and engaging introduction.A common complaint in America today is that politics and even society as a whole are broken.

Writing in the fourth century B.C., in an Athens that had suffered a humiliating defeat in the Peloponnesian War, Plato formulated questions that have haunted the moral, religious, and political imagination of the West for more than 2,000 years: what is virtue? How should we love? What constitutes a good society? Is there a soul that outlasts the body and a truth that transcends appearance? What do we know and how do we know it? Plato's inquiries were all the more resonant because he couched them in the form of dramatic and often highly comic dialogues, whose principal personage was the ironic, teasing, and relentlessly searching philosopher Socrates.In this splendid collection, Scott Buchanan brings together the most important of Plato's dialogues, including Protagoras, The Symposium, with its barbed conjectures about the relation between love and madness, Phaedo and The Republic, his monumental work of political philosophy.

Plato the trial and death of socrates hackett