/lit/ - Literature

Anybody care to have a discussion about Socrates and Socratic philosophy in general? Been doing some research on the guy.

We love to group together people from varied, highly diverse backgrounds based on their philosophical ideas, but it seems as if we don't contextualize their political/public expressions proportionately to the content of those ideas themselves. What Socrates had to say was incredibly interesting, but while approaching it, I've encountered two necessary research steps.
First, we have to analyze the people he talked to, the order he in which he talked to them, and the places in which his interloculars fit within his public life. The patterns created by the steps he took to secure and alter his place in society have been essential to me in reading his work.

Second, I've found it important to analyze changes in the tones and presentations of the two main sources through which we've learned about him: Xenophon and Plato. Xenophon seems to handle Socrates from the perspective of a public biographer. Through his argument for the posthumous absolvement of Socrates' guilt in Athens, one can see that he was addressing the issues of Socrates' life and legacy along the lines of "traditional" Greek public communication, for clearly political/practical purposes. With Plato, the changes in how Socrates is portrayed, both in tone and the content of ideas, reflect a change from Plato's role as a biographer to a developer of philosophical ideas himself. Plato's position within a powerful Greek family and the state of protection it ensured further bolster the sense of stylistic freedom we get from his writing.

Anyhoo, I thought these two issues should be given more importance in an analysis of Socrates' life.

In b4 faggot.