Back to engage in what Doug calls the favorite indoor sport of Marxists--and damn, it feels good.
Anyway, you wrote:
> probably Socrates (was) equally reactionary. He did
> hobnob with those who ran the brief tyranny after
> Sparta defeated Athens.
Not only hobnobbed, but arguably trained them. Critias, one of the Thirty Tyrants the Spartans installed, was one of Socrates's students--uh, friends, sorry 'bout that, Socrates didn't take money for his teaching. And let's not forget the ambitious Alcibiades who switched sides several times during the war...
> And from what we can tell his "economic base" was
> much like that of a modern director of a large
> foundation like the Ford.
Heh. Good one. What kills me about smarmy old Socrates is his pleading poverty in the _Apology_ after being convicted, and then offering to have the sons of some of the richest families in Athens pay a fine of 5 minae as his penalty.
After which, the Athenians did the right thing--they voted to execute him by an even larger majority than they voted to convict.
A mercifully short illustration of Platonic deconstruction is the _Euthyphro_, where SOS (smarmy old Socrates) is sitting outside the King Archon's court waiting to be tried, and the young man of the title comes along to prosecute his own father for murdering a slave. Since Euthyphro claims to be bringing the charge out of religious duty and SOS is about to be tried for impiety, SOS asks Euthyphro to teach him what piety is, and of course, goes on to deconstruct every definition Euthyphro goes him. This usually gets glossed as an inquiry into the nature of definitions and how satisfactory definitions must give the essential attributes of a thing rather than be examples of that thing, but I can't help but see the point of the dialogue being that Euthyphro doesn't know what piety is because he's prosecuting his father for killing a slave.
-- Curtiss
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