Benquo

And that pointing out that the laws are incoherent cannot be a violation of the laws, because that sort of criticism is necessary if we are to have laws at all.

Plato responded to his beloved mentor's death by founding the Academy, a great house in Athens where philosophical reasoning was taught methodically.

we still have our academics.

Agnes Callard, in her recent book Open Socrates, wants Socrates to be timeless.

She strips out the historical situation, strips out the aliveness that preceded the method, and ends up defending a method that's obviously inapplicable in many of the cases where she claims it applies.

Aristarchus did not need his assumptions questioned at random.

He needed someone who could ask probing questions about his actual problem from a perspective that didn't share his assumptions about what was and wasn't possible.

Zvi Moshoitz, in his review of Khaled's book, Part 1, Part 2, argues at considerable length that the decontextualized version is bad.

Destabilizing them is usually harmful.

Most people do not want to spend their lives in Socratic questioning, and they are right.

But Zvi has written a long polemic in two installments on the winning side of an incredibly lame debate about whether we should anxiously doubt ourselves all the time, responding to Khaled's decontextualized Socrates, not the real one.

The real one did not devise a method and then apply it.

He had a quality, something the oracle reached for the language of the tragedians to describe.

And what was memorialized as a method was what happened when that quality met a city where every other participant in public life had stopped being alive.

Socrates invokes timeless considerations like logical coherence and having reasons for your opinions, but timeless considerations are a very natural thing to try to appeal to when people are being squirmy and dramatic and hard to pin down, and fleeing to abstractions that resist empirical falsification.

Spinoza, in the Theologico-Political Treatise, similarly resituated the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth in their proper context.

The political teachings of the Gospels to turn the other cheek, forgive debts, and render unto Caesar what is due to him are instructions for people living under a hostile and extractive system of domination.

Citizens of a free republic have entirely different duties.

They have an affirmative obligation to hold each other accountable, to sue people who have wronged them, to participate in collective self-governance.

The teachings are not wrong.