July 2009 Archives

In episode six of the Digital Dialogue, I am joined by Marina McCoy, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and longstanding member of the Ancient Philosophy Society.

Marina has written extensively on Plato, focusing on the role of rhetoric in his thinking. Her recent book, Plato on the Rhetoric of Philosophers and Sophists, published by Cambridge University Press, investigates the relation between Socratic questioning and the rhetoric of the sophists.

She shows, convincingly, that part of what differentiates the Socratic practice of philosophy from other rhetorical activities is that the activity of philosophy involves at once a commitment to the truth and an openness to questioning the human relation to the truth itself.

In the podcast we focus on passage from Plato's Protagoras in which the issue of the nature of Socratic questioning is at play.  These include 331c5-d1, 333c9-d6 and 348c-d.  We then turn to the question of what Marina calls "sympathetic listening" and the degree to which this is an important for the transformative possibilities of dialogue.  There the passages we touch upon are: 328e-329b.  For examples of Hippocrates listening, see 312a and for the scene at the doorway, see 314c-e.  For the passage that suggests that Protagoras is not a bad listener, see, for example, 359d.

In episode five of the Digital Dialogue podcast, I am joined by Joshua Miller, Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy and blogger under the pseudonym anotherpanacea. We focus on the question of identity and anonymity. 

In episode four of the Digital Dialogue podcast, Allan Gyorke and I talk with recent PhD Philosophy graduate and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at New Jersey Institute of Technology, Michael Brownstein, about his work on the social practices embodied by web 2.0 technologies. We discuss his paper The Background, the Body and the Internet: Locating Practical Understanding in Digital Culture, in which he criticizes Hubert Dreyfus's position that the internet is incapable of cultivating a genuine public space.  Michael uses the work of Bourdieu to argue that the social fields opened by web 2.0 technologies are informed by a set of habits (in the sense of habitus) that lend themselves to scholarly study.  This study, he calls, following Dreyfus's characterization of Bourdieu's project, an "empirical program of existential analytics."

In an attempt to perform a bit of Socratic politics and extend this project to a wider community, my TLT fellowship team and I thought it would be interesting to produce a YouTube video that would turn people's attention to the question of justice.  

In episode 03 of the Digital Dialogue Podcast, Ryan, Matt, Allan and I consider the question of sincerity as it relates to dialogue and politics. In the course of the discussion, we consider how the disjunction between words and deeds is erosive of politics, the relation between sincerity and playfulness and how different modes of digital expression offer different possibilities of connection.

Digital Dialogue 03: Sincerity.

The sentence from the Gorgias that provokes this inquiry into the nature of Socratic politics comes toward the end of the dialogue, when Socrates has worn out the belligerent Callicles, who has here all but given up trying to combat Socrates.  This is what Socrates says:

I think that with few Athenians, so as not to say the only one, I attempt (epicheirein) the political art truly and I alone of those now living practice politics; for it is not with a view to gratification that I speak the speeches I speak on each occasion, but with a view to the best... (521d6-9)

There is much to discuss in this passage, and I will need to return to it in further detail over the course of the inquiry, but I cite it here at the beginning to emphasize that Socrates explicitly says that he attempts, or tries -- indeed, tries his hand at -- the political art.

(David Roochnik emphasizes this in Of Art and Wisdom: Plato's Understanding of Techne. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, 191.)

Politics here is something attempted, and to practice it truly requires a certain way of speaking.  The speeches spoken on each occasion must be said with a view not to gratification, but they must be directed toward the best, which remains itself elusive. 

Thus, the false modesty with which the sentence begins is ultimately eclipsed by a true humility that attempts to articulate the best, even as it remains beyond the human grasp.