Sublime

Socrates thinks it shouldn’t be, because what we want to work out is not who wins, but who is right. A fight is a conflict of interest, and a disagreement that has been turned into a fight stands at a symbolic remove from the adjudication of the disagreement. When we are working out who wins, we are,

THE great pre-Socratic systems that we have been considering were confronted, in the latter half of the fifth century, by a sceptical movement, in which the most important figure was Protagoras, chief of the Sophists. The word “Sophist” had originally no bad connotation; it meant, as nearly as may be, what we mean by “professor.” A Sophist was a

CHAPTER XI Socrates

Los que buscan verdaderamente la sabiduría son aquellos que reconocen la virtud en sus adversarios y que aprenden de aquellos a quienes sacan del error.

Socrates thought knowledge was there for the taking, and spent his life trying to take it. He was neither a sadist who took pleasure in exposing the weaknesses of others nor a freelance therapist out to rehabilitate the broken citizens of Athens. He was always clear that what drives him, Socrates, to ask people questions is quite simply the desire

Socrates diagnoses their mistake as trying to answer the question of whether virtue can be taught or whether virtue is knowledge without asking, “What is virtue?”

This is the birth of “epistemic humility” in Western philosophy: the acknowledgment that one’s blind spots and shortcomings are an invitation for ongoing intellectual investigation and growth.