GiT Apology 1 

In this episode, Socrates explains his divine calling to troll the city of Athens and why you’d have to be an absolute idiot not to think you’re a moron.

This is Good in Theory, I’m Clif Mark

INTRO:  

Today… we’re starting on a 4-episode series about Plato’s book The Apology of Socrates, or the Apology for short. 

This book is based on the actual historical trial where Socrates… grand-daddy of the entire Western philosophical tradition… is sentenced to death for impiety and corrupting the youth. 

The general format for the next couple of episodes is going to be me paraphrasing sections of the book pretty closely… so you get a good idea of the action and feel of the book… 

And then interrupting he paraphrase every so often to explain points I think are interesting or give context… or just to stop and appreciate how weird Socrates is being. 

But before we start that, I want to spend a few minutes explaining who Socrates is and why I the Apology is such a good place to start a podcast on political theory. 

INTRO

Socrates lived in ancient Athens… and he’s the guy who kind of really kick-started the whole stereotype of the philosopher as unworldly slob. (slovenly outsider) 

He didn’t change his clothes much… often walked around barefoot… didn’t cut his hair…. 

And he was ugly. People made fun of his bulgy eyes… and upturned nose… and big fishy lips… 

And he was always broke. 

And that’s because, even more than today… “being a philosopher” in Athens was not a job. There were no universities and he never got paid for teaching and he never wrote any books. 

For Socrates, being a philosopher just meant having deep talks. If you’ve ever heard of the “Socratic method,” this is it.  It’s philosophy as conversation. Question and answer. 

You raise some topic… state an opinion… then you talk it out. Find contradictions and blind spots. Revise your views. Try new opinions… and

ideally everyone moves closer to the truth. 

This is what Socrates did every day, in the marketplace, in the streets, at parties…with whoever would talk to him. 

 And since normal Athenian men spent their time actually working for a living… or getting involved in politics and public life… all this made Socrates kind of a weirdo. 

But despite the whole dishevelled eccentric vibe… 

Socrates was also a star. 

Socrates had fans, 

Young men in Athens would come to the marketplace just to watch him talk to other people… even if they didn’t get the chance to talk to him themselves… they’d follow him around… copy his arguments… try to sleep with him… they wrote fan fiction about him. 

At one point… one of the biggest playwrights in Athens staged a play ABOUT Socrates.

So he’s famous.  

But he just carried on as always…  talking philosophy every day, with whoever wanted to talk to him…  

Until, when he was 70 years old, his fellow citizens decide they don’t like his philosophy anymore… and haul him into court… and they sentence him to death for impiety and corrupting the youth. 

And Plato’s Apology is Plato’s dramatic retelling of the speech that Socrates gave in his own defence at his trial. 

The book is NOT called Apology because Socrates is saying sorry.

As you’re gonna see, he’s really NOT sorry.

The word “apology” or “apologia” is just the ancient Greek word for “defence speech” as in the speech you give in court to defend. 

And the book is not supposed to be a transcript of exactly what Socrates said on the day, think of it more as a movie that is “based on a true story.”

BUT… whatever the historical accuracy of the book… it’s been a civilization-level smash hit.  

This story of Socrates’s trial… especially as Plato tells it…is a massive touchstone for Western culture and philosophy…

People have been coming back to it ever since it happened. 

Partly… it’s because it’s terrific story: “intellectual teen idol sentenced to death for corrupting fans”

But also… the story also raises some really interesting theoretical questions about the relationship between politics and philosophy… issues of censorship and free speech… and in general the ethics and psychology of making people shut up. 

The SUPER BASIC simplified morality-tale version of the story is this: 

Socrates is virtuous, wise, innocent… and bravely stands up to his persecutors.

Athens is irrational, emotional, intolerant… 100% the asshole in the interaction. 

And the moral of the story… that changes around depending on who’s telling it… but it’s usually something like: 

freedom of speech is awesome and if you do censorship, you’re basically killing Socrates. 

If you remember that… then you will understand the vast majority of cultural references to this story … 

HOWEVER….  

[I don’t want to tell that version of the story. 

First of all… from a theoretical point of view… it’s BORING. 

You do not need me to tell you it’s wrong to kill innocent philosophers. 

TWO… the thing about telling the morality tale version of things is that they usually become irrelevant to real life. 

Let me explain what I mean. 

The questions of free expression and the ethics and psychology of shutting people up… 

These are LIVE questions. 

I believe that we in the early 21st century have lived through a true golden age of telling each other to shut up. 

We do it over… 

hate speech; explicit song lyrics; ambiguous song lyrics; dirty movies; offensive tweets; terrorist propaganda… 

You name it, someone else is saying you should say that. 

True… 

Nobody’s asking for state-administered hemlock executions,  

but depending on context, people ARE trying to shut each other up by having them:  

Thrown in prison; 

Kicked off social media;

Fired from their job; 

Harassed on twitter, 

Publicly shamed… 

The modes of shutting people up are many.  

BUT… for all the fights over free speech, big and small, online and in real life: 

I’ve NEVER seen anyone saying that we should execute an innocent senior citizen for doing philosophy. 

So if Socrates’s trial is going to tell us anything about the ethics of shutting each other up, then there’s got to be more to it than: 

Free speech good, censorship bad. Don’t kill grandpa. 

And… in fact… there IS a lot more to it. 

I’m NOT saying that getting suspended from YouTube is the same as being sentenced to death by the Athenian state. 

But…

when I dug a little deeper into Socrates’s story… I found a LOT of the same issues… the same arguments and emotions and circumstances… that I see pop up again and again in today’s debates over free speech. 

I found a story that involves… trolling… paranoia… and political polarization… and all sorts of things that feel really familiar to me. 

So I’m going to tell you the longer version… and it’s going to take awhile, but it’s going to be worth it. 

 We’re going to spend two episodes directly on the text of the Apology. 

We’re going to get to know Socrates as a character and analyze his defence. 

Essentially… the first two episodes are going to tell his side of the story. We’re going to hear from the man who feels he is being unjustly censored by a bunch of oversensitive idiots. 

THEN… we’re going  to spend some time looking at the other side of the story. 

Because… Athens was one of the most liberal… philosophy-loving places in the ancient world. 

The term is a bit anachronistic… but generally they did value free speech and inquiry… so it’s worth asking why a majority of Socrates’s fellow citizens thought it was safer to kill him than to let him carry on doing philosophy. 

… and what that can all tell us about the tricky relationship between politics and philosophy.

But to do that, we’re going to need to go beyond the text of the apology and fill in some of the historical context of the trial. 

But for now… let’s get on with the text. 

[APOLOGY THE TEXT INTRO] 

So Apology is a courtroom drama… but Athenian courts were different from ours. 

Think of it as a rowdy people’s court. 

There were no professional lawyers. 

The prosecution… that was just whoever decided to file a charge against another citizen. 

And the accused had to defend himself. 

There was no judge to interpret and apply the law. 

That was up to the jury. 

And the jury wasn’t 12 strangers carefully chosen to avoid bias or conflict of interest. 

In Socrates’s trial, it was 501 citizens chosen at random. 

Given how small the citizen population of Athens was… 

This meant that the jury included personal friends, enemies, and rivals both of Socrates and his accusers. 

Also… since Socrates was famous… a lot of people would already have an opinion about him. 

In addition to the 500-person jury… there would have also been a lot of people who just turned up to watch the celebrity trial. 

And they didn’t keep quiet. The crowd would would laugh and cheer and boo at the speakers. 

Socrates has to ask them to settle down more than once. 

The trial starts with speeches from Socrates’s three accusers, but the book leaves these out. 

The text starts when Socrates stands up to defend himself. 

I’m now going to paraphrase his speech, so I’ll be talking AS Socrates, then I’ll stop every so often to explain what’s going on. And I’m going to signal the shifts with some sound effects. 

So picture Socrates…. 70 years old, ugly and unkempt… 

He walks out onto a low stage under a portico in front of a big rowdy crowd and he says… 

PARAPHRASE 1: I CAN FINALLY HEAR THE HATERS

I don’t know about you guys… but I really enjoyed those speeches. 

My accusers were good! 

I think I would probably convict myself if anything they said was true. 

There were a lot of lies in there…  but my favourite was when they warned you all what a dangerous speaker I am. 

That you I was going to come up here and put you all under the spell of my rhetorical black magic.

Ridiculous.

 I’m not a very good public speaker 

I’ve never been in court before, so I don’t know all fancy lingo they used.

So don’t hold it against me if I talk to you the same way I talk normally. 

I’m just going to tell you the plain truth and you decide what’s the just thing to do.

..

Before I even start to address my present accusers…

I have to talk about my old accusers. 

The truth is, my haters have  talking shit about me since before some of you were born. 

You’ve probably heard people that I’m a very dangerous man because I study the things in the sky and below the ground… and that I know how to make weak arguments seem stronger… and that I teach young men to do the same. 

But don’t you remember where these stories come from? 

You’ve all seen or at least heard about Aristophanes’ play about me. The Clouds. 

And I hereby fully confess that the character called Socrates in this play is guilty of the those things. 

In the play, Socrates swings around in a basket in the sky… he studies the clouds and thunder… and teaches young men how to use rhetoric to “prove” the most absurd and immoral things. 

But… wise citizens of Athens…   

Do you know how comedy works? 

Did you think it was real? 

Let’s settle this. 

Please…  if anyone here has EVER heard me talking about the underworld or cloud farts or anything like that, tell everyone else. 

And while you’re at it… if I have charged any of you a single drachma for philosophy or rhetoric lessons, please let everyone know. 

Nobody? That’s  because these are just rumours that people have repeated for years… and somehow… I guess if you say it enough times… people start believing. 

And now my new accusers decide they want to take me down… and so they made up an official legal charge based on rumours… that are based on what a character did in a comedy that came out over 20 years ago. 

Which… wow. 

EXPLAINER: two “old” accusations

This part of the dialogue is pretty straightforward. 

Socrates is just saying he knows he’s got a messed up reputation around town… but that’s just because of rumours that people have been spreading his whole life. 

But I want to say a LITTLE something about Aristophanes and the 

Nature of the rumours about Socrates. 

Aristophanes... was one of the top playwrights in Ancient Greece… and he staged a play based on Socrates. 

Theatre was THE pop culture mass medium for Athens… so if Aristophanes puts something on… everyone sees it or at least hears about it. 

And his style is to do really broad comedies. Think of a Saturday Night Live sketch about a celebrity. He takes a couple of characteristics of a someone and just exaggerates them till they’re ridiculous. 

What does that have to do with the rumours about Socrates? 

When Socrates is complaining that people spread rumours that he “studies things in the heaven and beneath the earth” and  “makes the weaker argument seem stronger” this may have sounded a little unfamiliar and mysterious… 

But they are specific references to Aristophanes’s play AND to two different kinds of intellectuals that lived in Athens. 

The ‘studies the heavens’ thing is about natural philosophy. 

In ancient Greece…natural philosophers would look at the world… and invent theories about how nature and the cosmos worked…. They are basically what we would call scientists today. 

And they were often under suspicion for doing impious stuff because…

you know… scientists are always poking their pointy eggheads where they don’t belong… and sometimes do things that seem ethically messed up or impious… 

Think of Dr. Frankenstein… or Galileo… or someone like that. 

The “making weaker argument seem stronger” thing is a reference to “sophists” which is a different genre of shady intellectual. 

 Sophists were teachers of rhetoric. 

This was a really important skill in Athens where all politics gets done by making speeches in the assembly and you have to speak for yourself if you ever wind up in court…

So ALL posh Athenians took some rhetoric with the sophists. 

BUT there was also sometimes backlash against these guys because 

… rhetoric is a suspicious skill. 

If someone is really good, then they might be able to manipulate people and make them believe things that aren’t true at all. They make weak arguments seem strong. 

So Athenians were suspicious of sophists in the same way that some people today are suspicious of slick lawyers or demagogues.

The Socrates character in Aristophanes’s play was a mash up of both of these kinds of people.

As a natural philosophy… he floats around in a basket in the sky and researches cloud farts and what-not….

And as a sophist, he teaches kids arguments proving that it’s good for them to beat up their parents.  

So yeah…

The Socrates character is guilty of impiety and corrupting the youth, but the play is a farce… it’s as realistic as a Will Ferrell movie. 

And everyone… including Socrates… thought it was funny at the time. 

But NOW at his trial… these rumours are coming back as a real charge. 

First as farce, then as tragedy. 

So the first section, Socrates says that all the charges are just based on rumours from the haters… 

in the section coming up,  he’s going to explain why they hate him so much.

PARAPHRASE 2: THE DIVINE TROLL

I bet some of you are thinking that…

If I really didn’t do any of those things… where did all these rumours come from? Could thousands of Athenians really be wrong? 

Why would anyone lie about stuff like this? 

I’ll tell you: 

the reason that these people are so mad they want to have me executed is…. 

Because I’m  smarter than they are. 

I am not bragging. The oracle said so. 

You all know my friend Chairephon [pronunciation?), right?

One time he went down to Delphi to the oracle.

And but he asked: “is there any man wiser than Socrates?”

And the oracle said “nope.”

I was as surprised.

I have never thought of myself as wise,

So I thought this oracle must be some kind of riddle. 

And I decided that I’d just find someone smarter than me and prove the oracle wrong.

That’s how it all started. 

First guy I talked to… I’m not going to mention any names… was a big deal politician that seemed wise to a lot of people, especially himself. 

I walk up to him. We chat for awhile, I ask him some questions, and you know what I found out?

He was not actually very smart.

He was confused and contradicting himself after just a couple minutes of questions. 

And when I pointed that out to him… he started to dislike me. 

I thought to myself. Maybe I am smarter than this guy. I mean, neither of us know anything, but at least I’m aware of it. 

This guy thinks he’s a genius. 

I tried again with another guy who was supposed to be even smarter than the first.

Then another.

After the politicians, I talked to the poets and then the craftsmen and basically, I talked to everyone in town that had any reputation for wisdom at all. 

I know this sounds extreme, but an oracle’s an oracle, amirite? 

You know what I learned over decades of talking to all the citizens and foreigners I could find in the agora? 

Everybody is dumb.

But the dumbest guys are always with the biggest reputation for knowledge.

Politicians, poets, craftsmen whoever… yes, they know one thing really well… and then they somehow convince themselves they knew everything. 

So when you ask them about anything, they have tons of confidence, but  really no clue what they are talking about

That’s what the oracle meant:

I, Socrates, am wiser than everyone else because I’m the only one who isn’t under the false impression that I know anything.

I know I know nothing.

And wisdom is just recognizing how worthless and flawed human intelligence really is. 

I’m not hustling your kids for rhetoric lessons or teaching them any weird theories about the cosmos. 

To help the oracle, I just talk to people I think are wise. And if I find out they aren’t I point that out to them. 

Unfortunately… 

This has made me somewhat unpopular. 

And it’s also why they accuse me of corrupting the youth. 

A lot of young men have seen first-hand how easy it is to own the know-it-alls, they sometimes like to try it themselves. 

And when THAT happens, whoever they talk to winds up shaking his fist and saying “Socrates has been corrupting these youth!”

But when you ask them how I’m corrupting the youth they just hit the same stupid clichés that Aristophanes used in his play. 

Which… apparently… a lot of you believe. 

EXPLAINER

I’m going to come back to the whole “god-given mission to show people how stupid they are…” in the conclusion of this episode…

But for now I want to talk about Socrates’s so-called “ignorance.” 

“The only thing I know is that I know nothing” thing, which is one of the top catchphrases in philosophy.

BUT… it’s a bit weird right? Because Socrates is obviously really smart. He’s out on the street owning Athens’s best and brightest, so how can he say he knows nothing? 

Okay… I want to outline two possible responses to learning something. 

ONE… is that learning things actually makes you more modest… because one of the things you learn is how little you actually know. 

Take the example of academia. 

If you ace your undergraduate exams that is the last best chance you have of feeling like you really know everything. 

If you keep going… and you do a PhD… and you start to explore all the different lines of research and argument on your topic…which is super tiny and focussed to start with… You should get a really deep experiential sense of how ignorant you are. 

Unless you are some kind of egomaniac… you should be humbled. 

[For some people… this kind of intellectual modesty can only be cured by getting a job where a roomful of young people urgently take notes on everything they say… ] 

And it’s not just academics. I’ve heard comedians and writers and actors and people from all fields say the same kind of thing. The more they learn about their craft, the more they realize there is to learn. 

Socrates is ignorant like that. 

He’s had all  the common big philosophical conversations thousands times and he’s read all the big books… and knows the weaknesses and contradictions inherent in every position. 

So he KNOWS he doesn’t have any rock-solid answers. He knows how limited his knowledge actually is. 

But that also keeps him keen. 

His awareness of his ignorance makes him conscious that he always has something to learn… so he’s always ready to start the conversations again because you never know where it’ll go this time and maybe he’ll find another puzzle piece to add. 

The OTHER possible response to learning something… is you develop some knowledge or expertise… then you start to convince yourself that since you’re smart in that subject… you’re smart in EVERY subject. 

This is how Socrates describes the know-it-alls of Athens. 

This is why he says that “the dumbest guys in town” are always the people who are smart in one thing.

And I think about this point ALL the time. 

I think about it when a natural scientist starts opining on religion. 

I think about it when an actor starts giving out advice on health and wellness. 

Or especially, and this is more common than you may think, when a psychologist starts telling me what to think about politics. 

So remember Socrates’s point: 

Expertise in one field doesn’t give you expertise in any other field. 

Actually, it’s more common that expertise in one field will strip you of the intellectual modesty necessary to learn anything else. 

In other words: 

You would have to be a idiot not to think that you’re a moron. 

The last bit of the book I want to paraphrase today Socrates is going to call up his main accuser to question him. This is not a very common thing to do in an Athenian trial… but it’s very much Socrates style, so that’s what he does. 

PARAPHRASE 3: MELETUS

Meletus officially accuses me of: 

-Corrupting the young and not believing in the gods in whom the city believes, but in other new spiritual things?”

Well… 

I accuse Meletus of starting frivolous court cases about things that doesn’t know the first thing about. 

And I’m going to prove it in my usual manner. 

Meletus. Come over here. I’ve got a few questions about your accusation.

SOCR: I know that you think that it’s important that the young men of Athens turn out as well as possible… and I know that you’ve discovered that I corrupt them. 

But who, in your opinion, improves our boys, Meletus? 

Meletus: The laws Socrates. 

Socrates: That’s not what I asked. What person improves them? Who knows what the laws are all about in the first place? 

Meletus: These Jurymen, Socrates. 

Socrates: All of them? Wow. What about the audience? And the members of the council? And the assembly? 

Meletus: Yes Socrates, they improve young men and you are corrupting them. 

Socrates: So… you think that every citizen is a good influence in young men… and that I alone corrupt them. 

But tell me….

How do you raise a horse? 

If you want to improve your horse… would you just leave it out on the street so any Athenian who happens by can have a try with it?

Isn’t the best way to improve horses to entrust them to specialized horse breeders who actually have some experience with horses? 

And isn’t the same true of boys? 

We all know it is, no matter what you say now. 

And I hope all of you in the audience heard how ridiculous Meletus is being. 

SOCRATES: Meletus, Do you think it’s better to live among good fellow-citizens or bad ones?

MELETUS: Good ones, Socrates.

Soc: And bad people… they have a tendency of harming those around them, right? Like… that’s why we call them bad.

Mel: Yes, obviously.

Soc: Okay, then let me ask you this. Can you imagine any person who would want to be harmed by his associates?

Mel: No. Of course not. Get to the point.

SOc: Meletus, THIS is the point. 

You say that corrupting people makes them worse. 

And that worse people are more likely to harm those around them. 

AND you admit that nobody wants to be harmed by their associates.

But if that’s true, WHY would I corrupt MY associates if  it would just make them more likely to harm me? 

This doesn’t make any sense Meletus. 

Gentlemen of the jury… Meletus is already contradicting himself…. And has 

clearly not spent any time ever thinking about how education works. 

End interrogation of Meletus

Socrates goes on to question Meletus about the impiety charge… and it’s in the same style. He trips him up on his definitions of atheism and spirits… and catches him in a logic trap… and then accuses him of being clown who didn’t even believe his own charges. 

And he concludes the interrogation by saying to the audience: 

 “I’ve made it obvious that Meletus is a clown and his charges are bogus. So if I get convicted… it’s only because of slander and envy… Not that that would surprise me.” 

There’s quite a bit left in the dialogue after that… but I’m going to leave the rest for next episode.

To conclude THIS episode… I want to talk a bit about what we’ve seen so far of Socrates’s about character  

So… first… I want to start with one dominant idea or stereotype of who Socrates is and what he’s like. 

Personally, I’d heard of Socrates before I really got into Plato… and I basically knew him from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure… and other important cultural references. 

And I had an idea in my head of Socrates as a kind of wise old mentor type helping the young men of Athens become better dudes. 

Like an Ancient Greek Yoda. 

And when I look at him this way… the Socratic method looks like a pretty sweet pedagogical method. 

You ask questions and test assumptions… but it’s a back and forth where you’re supposed to be moving together towards the truth. 

And his ignorance is this intellectual humility that keeps him curious.

This version of Socrates fits really well with the whole “innocent martyr of philosophy” way of telling this story. 

And… it isn’t totally fake. He IS a sweetheart a lot of the time. 

But not in The Apology. 

In the apology… it’s a much more asshole-ish version of Socrates. And I missed this completely for a long time because the whole Philosophy Yoda thing was in my head. 

Think how he describes his philosophical life in this book. 

He doesn’t say anything about co-operative conversation and moving towards higher truths. 

He describes himself as a Divine troll… on a God-given mission to make everyone he can talk to look stupid. 

And when we think of him THIS way, other things look different too. 

A lot of people who talked to Socrates just thought his so-called “ignorance” was a shtick. He was just playing dumb to lure people into conversations where he could embarrass them. 

And when he talks to Meletus… 

It’s like he’s using an dark version of the Socratic method. 

It’s still question and answer, but instead of guiding Meletus to a new philosophical discovery…. 

He’s just making him contradict himself in front of the audience to make him look like an ass. 

One of Socrates’s arguments is when he says that corrupting people makes them worse and worse people are likely to harm you so there’s never any reason to corrupt someone.

I find this hilarious… because he’s basically saying… “ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the prosecutor has just admitted that crime does not pay. But if crime doesn’t pay, what possible motive could I have had to commit this crime?”

The argument is funny and logical… Socrates is not teaching Meletus anything… and he’s not even really establishing his innocence. 

He’s just embarrassing him. 

Yes. Meletus is trying to have Socrates killed, so that may be fair game. … but Socrates does this all the time. Remember, he calls what he does to Meletus “his usual manner.” 

So… one thing I want to leave you with from this episode is these two sides of Socrates character. 

Saint Socrates of Philosophy who is kind and wise

And Socrates the Divine Troll who’s arrogant and annoying. 

I’ll tell you that he’s both depending on the situation and who he’s talking to. And a lot of the time, it’s not even easy to tell which mode he’s in. 

And actually… this duality to his character is part of what makes him so interesting. You can never really tell when he’s kidding. 

But in Apology he’s leading hard towards troll-mode. 

The other thing I want to leave you with is a sense that something is weird about Socrates’s defence strategy. 

Like… it’s one thing to go hard on your prosecutor… but Socrates also is kind of salty towards the jury. 

He is sarcastic from the beginning… but this conversation with Meletus really brings it out. 

Socrates’s other argument with Meletus about corruption is where he

compares educating boys to educating horses… and says that both are matters for experts. 

Again… I think that… in the abstract… there is something to this argument. I think that teaching is a skill and some people are better at it than others and some people make better role models than others. 

BUT…  

If we put the argument into the context of a democratic court in Athens… it sounds a little different. 

Meletus is saying that the jury and the assembly and the laws and ALL of the citizens of Athens are the ones who improve young men. 

Which… yes… that does sound a bit corny and a bit like he’s sucking up to the jury. 

BUT… this is a participatory democracy… and it’s true that actually going down to the assembly and seeing how citizens debated and how laws were made… and observing the older men was supposed to provide some moral and civic education to young citizens.

It’s a civic version of the village raising the child.

And so citizens of Athens kind felt like it was their collective duty to set an example for and educate the next generation. 

And the citizens… that’s the people in the jury. 

And Socrates comes up and says “you want to let this mob of randoms educate our youth? I wouldn’t trust them with a horse!”

Socrates isn’t just messing with Meletus… he’s also kind of insulting the jury. 

All of this raises a question. 

If you’re on trial… and your survival depends on trying to win a jury over to your side…

Why do you lead with the annoying arrogant side of your personality instead of the nice one? 

Why do you go out of your way to antagonize the jury? 

Next time… we’re going to see Socrates get WAY more cheeky with the audience… talk about WHY he might have done it, and  talk through some of the philosophical lessons that people have taken out of this book. 

Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you then. 

Final segment

Closing credits: 

That was Good in Theory for this week. 

I’d like to thank:

Clayton Tapp for the opening theme music and David Zikovitz for the closing theme. 

Marijke Bouchier for the beautiful podcast art…. There is a link to her website in the show notes. 

I would like to thank an anonymous theory elf for continued input and support. 

And thank you for listening!

If you enjoyed the show… please tell a friend about it. 

If you don’t have a friend… or even if you do… I’d really appreciate it if you left a review on iTunes. That’s one of the best ways to help new people that neither of us know find the show. 

PLUS… I enjoy the attention. 

When I write and research these podcasts… I find a tonne of interesting stuff that just doesn’t really fit into the flow of the main episode. So I like to take a couple of minutes at the end to tell you about an interesting historical fact or some point of theory that I find interesting. 

This week… I want to mention one other reason why Socrates’s trial is a great place to start a philosophy podcast. 

[PLATO ORIGINS]

And THAT’S because this trial is also Plato’s origin story and therefore the origin story for the entire Western philosophical tradition. 

You know how in Batman… baby billionaire Bruce watches his parents get killed… and that starts him on the vigilante road…

This is that for Plato. 

Socrates was Plato’s teacher. And Plato was the biggest teacher’s pet in the history of philosophy. 

He’s at the trial… and he takes it hard when they kill his teacher… 

Plato packs up… 

leaves Athens and goes on this study abroad quest to become the ultimate philosopher… He goes to Italy to study math with the Pythagoreans and to Egypt to study astronomy and religion… and travels all around the Mediterranean training to become the perfect philosopher.  

After 12 years…  he comes back to Athens and founds a school of philosophy called the Academy (which is where we get the word “Academia”). 

Plato also wrote a bunch of books that were dialogues with Socrates in the starring role… and these books became the basis of the Western philosophical tradition. 

So Western philosophy is founded on fanfic a guy wrote about his teacher.  

The Apology is one of these books.