Dinner with Socrates?

The audience at the TLS debate at the Oxford Literary Festival was asked last night whether it would say  yes or no to dinner in Athens with Socrates.

Did attenders relish the chance to question the world's most famous philosopher, to travel back in time 2,500 years to those dinner parties where truth and justice were the topics of talk?

Did they yearn to hear subjects discussed for the first time in any way that we would consider philosophical today?

Or was the Socratic crowd rather less than  it was cracked up to be?

Would anyone else  get a word in edgeways while a filthy old man drank, drivelled and chopped logic into his navel for hours?

Would any woman even get past the door if she was not available for sex-on-demand - or a 'flute-girl', as the classical euphemism has it?

Wouldn't any civilised person be better off washing their hair that night?

The virtues and vices of Socrates, fact and fictional, have occupied an extraordinarily central position in philosophy debates since the old boy hit the hemlock in 399BC. The night of April 1st in the Newman Rooms  was a well-attended addition to this distinguished history - not as cerebral as some but much more fun than most.

On the thanks-but-no-thanks side, we had Mary Beard, renowned subversive, blogger and our classics editor at the TLS - plus the historian Tom Holland.

On the yes-please-do-we--bring-a-bottle side we had our regular contributor, Oliver Taplin - and the renowned Platonist, M.M. McCabe.

Beard-Holland gave a gruesome account of the disgusting smell, food and sexual habits of a dinner with Socrates - with a warning that Plato's account of the magnetic sage was at variance with all the others. How would the time-traveller know what he or she was going to get?

Taplin-McCabe hit back with an appeal to put philosophy over foul behaviour and risk over comfort.

McCabe made the difference, in the impartial judgement of the chairman, with a spell-binding disquisition on the Socratic method of reaching truth and beauty and all those other things that Oxonians take for granted in the Newman Rooms.

RSVP. Yes, please, was the vote at the end of the night.

Comments

[Chris Gillibrand]

I hold Socrates personally responsible for the EU, given the elevated position that "experts" are given in his theory of government. Expert committees proliferate in every direction and on every subject here in Brussels. However, over the years reading the account of his death has brought tears to my eyes.

'Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius. Do pay it. Don't forget.' His last words.

[Terence Hale]

Hi,
Socrates a person who never put his thoughts to words Propagated through Plato. Some times words have no time
Regards Dr. Terence Hale

[Susan Balée]

It would all be Greek to me, since I don't speak the language, much less the ancient form of it. Did you qualify the dinner invite by saying all guests would magically be able to understand what the others were saying?

[Stephen Pain]

Yes - as long as the hemlock is kept out of sight. You might ask by way of a variation whether you would accept to have a dinner at McDonald's with Slavoj Žižek.

[Deborah Robinson]

Delightful. Having neglected to respond to your post of Feb 14th I HAD to pop in here (while waiting for a connection at the Atlanta airport) to tell you that this blog post came to me through a link on...can you believe it? a Google elephant alert. The article on Nassim Taleb, which links here, contains a reference to elephants. The world is a truly wondrous place, with magical and mysterious connections - and the part of the world that is the internet is no exception.

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Having read the Platonic dialogues (I am not sure how much in them is Socrates and how much Platonic reconstruction and embellishment), I would be enthralled to see that incomparable mind probing one dialectical position after another in the kind of depth that requires considerable mental agility on one's own part. Socrates might say that he has nailed down an important point at long last with the excitement of a master-detective ariving at the irrefutable solution.