Where Socrates and Grice Agree

By JLS
-- for the GC

THIS IS A COMMENTARY TO HELM´S commentary on the "eleutheros" post -- which I´ve been unable to copy under the relevant thread. Sorry about that. Helm is rightly pointing out the Stone´s code name, "Pancake".

Well, at least it wasn´t "Hemlock", his code name, I mean. That´s outrageous!

Anyway, the man has to be given credit for having to learn Attic just to understand the Trial of Socrates! Such good translations around!

He should have stuck with the Loeb Classical Library!

Oddly, the wiki entry says he studied philo at Pennsylvania, like Chomsky! (Chomsky´s tutor at Penn was the great Nelson Goodman. We are not told who taught Izzy).

Under "Trial of Socrates", wiki has:

"I. F. Stone, an American journalist, wrote a book entitled "Trial of Socrates" after his retirement, arguing that Socrates wanted to be sentenced to death in order to justify his opposition to the Athenian democracy."

"wanted to be sentenced to death" is ambiguous, but I get Stone´s point. The charges were clear enough and on two counts: corruption of the youth and reactionary and anti-religious crimes. The poor man only wanted to analyse the concept of "just" and see where that got him into! The fact that the trial was conducted in that cold language as Greek can be (as opposed to the more melodious and warm Italian) breaks my heart! Ah well...

---- Some people say that the Death of Socrates meant the Death of Philosophy, and the idiotic thing about this is that they are NOT being ironic!

I have entitled the post as I did vis a vis this essay by Georgi, for the University of Southern California, which is based on a quote in the Georgias towards the transcendental justification of honesty. Available online, the gist of it, and elsewhere -- including this blog post, if one can make use of the search engine thing.