Learning How to Die:
Socratic Discipline & the Philosophical Life

Instructor: Daniel Sacilotto Date & Time: July 15, 22, August 5, 12 14:00-16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: Alfred North Whitehead famously claimed that the whole of Western philosophy consisted of “footnotes to Plato.” This seminar takes this suggestion seriously, proposing an approximation to central exemplars from Plato’s dialogs to crystallize the birth of philosophical questioning across its metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions.

More deeply, we will ask: what is the true meaning of the philosophical life, if the latter cannot be assimilated to a mere craft, specialized knowledge or ‘business,’ but involves something decisive and fatal, in which an ultimate pronouncement on the part of human beings takes place? This is to fearlessly confront Plato’s mysterious suggestion in the Phaedo, in which Socrates, in his last hours, defines philosophy as the art of “learning how to die easily.” As such, this seminar can be understood at once as an introduction to philosophy, seeking to understand the vital impetus that fatefully orients it as a technology for dying. The seminar is organized in two parts, each organized in four weeks. The first part follows a close reading of Plato’s early, so-called “Socratic dialogs,” which recounts The Last Days of Socrates. This set of works encompasses the following dialogs: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.

As we shall see, already this set of works unearth the most fundamental questions of philosophy in their metaphysical, epistemological, ethico-political, and aesthetic dimensions, but also in their theoretical and practical inextricability. More fundamentally, these works propose a timeless and insuperable approximation to the demands of the philosophical life, illuminating the relation between the philosopher and its interlocutors, friends, and adversaries. These dialogs thereby interrogate the pedagogical and practical responsibility of philosophy to the city, in which the rapport between civil society and the state, the philosophical teacher and the youth, become key to decoding the crucial distinction between wisdom and knowledge, and finally between philosophy and the sophist or “men of the courts.” The second part proposes to follow key texts from Plato’s “middle-dialogs,” focusing on the central arc in which the tension between sophistry and philosophy approximates the possibility of a dialectical resolution between broadly Heraclitean and Parmenidean orientations of thought.

These works encompass the following dialogs: Cratylus, Theaetetus, Sophist, and Parmenides. Following this trajectory, we explore the consolidation of different methodological levers that philosophy assimilates and perennial problems that it confronts, in order to distinguish its own activity as much as its proper subject matter: the articulation between being and becoming; the dialectical tension between that which is and that which is not, and between the One and the Many; the analytic procedure of the method of division in which the separation of philosophy from sophistry becomes crystalized; the “war between names” revealed in etymological investigations between naturalists and relativists; the problematic articulation between perception and knowledge, and with it the embryonic distinction between empiricist and rationalist theories of knowledge; etc.

IMAGE: Untitled, Mark Rothko, Black on Gray, 1969

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