Professor Armand D’Angour

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82 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 7 Aug

Professor Armand D’Angour’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Talking History with Patrick Geoghegan · Neolithic Tombs In Galway · 7 Aug 2026 podcast

And again it points to Aspasia.

So the name and the date point to Aspasia.

One other, I think, quite important fact of the Platonic dialogues there are thirty plus dialogues and they all have Socrates as a central figure, and he's never taught anything by anyone.

Except in two dialogues, one of them is called the Menexenus, and he is taught by none other than Aspasia herself how to give a speech.

So Plato names her, and in the other dialogue where Socrates is taught, he is also taught by a woman, and it's the symposium in which he is taught by Diotoma what love means.

Even in her time, as you was seen to be exceptional.

And there are very few women in the fifth century who speak out and who have some presence in the way that she clearly did and became the focus of comic plays.

They were the equivalent of the newspapers of the time.

She was un an unusual woman.

I mean this simply reinforces that.

What I think it also does is show that the status of women is

cannot be taken as simply black and white, i.e., that they are free agents who are intellectuals, or that they are sequestered wives back at home.

There would have been a whole range of different statuses and even in ancient Athens, where on the whole women were considered to be second class citizens.

Uh but what's clear is that uh historically the connection between Aspager and Socrates does

bring in some interesting biographical changes to what we understand of about Socrates.

Does it change our understanding of his philosophy?

That has yet to be thought about in any detail.

In some ways it may not.

I mean you can look at the biography of any philosopher and say, does it make a difference whether he did X or Y?

Uh but I think um in terms of the biography of Socrates, of course it makes a huge difference.

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