Class #5 Review & Reminders

Feel free to ask further questions about the paper here or on the listserv. I wanted to share one useful idea that came out of office hours and two useful ideas that Schwab mentioned during today's staff meeting.

1. From office hours (by the way, come to office hours! if you wait 5 mins. after class I'll walk over with you and show you where it is)... anyhow, I was talking to a student in office hours today and I mentioned my "samurai theory of critique." What this means is that if you want to criticize the positions taken by a speaker like Eryximachus, you should start by constructing the best possible version of those positions, the strongest version of his argument, even if you have to be somewhat charitable and even inventive in doing so. The samurai part is, you win no honor by defeating a weak opponent, only by defeating a strong opponent. So make Eryximachus as strong as you can before you start to point out his limitations. Furthermore, if you read the prompt you see that the main point of the assignment is simply to construct his position in detail and that evaluating it doesn't even come until the very end for the most part.

2. Schwab A: Schwab wasn't sure if Socrates (or Plato) was as down on women as the other speakers. He wondered if the exclusion of women is part of the traditional ritual or culture of the symposium rather than part of the new philosophical view, or even if it is something particular to this group of men. He pointed out the important role of Diotima, and some things that Socrates said about women in other dialogues. I'm not sure I agree... it seems to me that Plato likes imaginary women more than real ones... but the point is it's an area for debate. I mean certainly in our own adoption of Socratic/Platonic ideas in class, we can just as well assume that any of the things said about men apply equally to women.

4. Schwab B... this one is more interesting: Schwab pointed out that each of the dialogues doesn't so much refute the previous one as preserve one or two useful elements of the previous one and then go forward with elaborating those. He contrasted the "integration" of previous ideas to the "negation" of previous ideas or the "competition" between ideas. In the same way, he said that to be a philosopher for Socrates was not to "negate" the pleasures of the body, but to "integrate" them along with the more important pleasures of the mind. This relates to one of my previous blog posts when I was talking about gooder and worser. Socrates still drinks wine... he just doesn't get as drunk as the other men because he is also focused on gooder mental pleasures instead of exclusively focused on worser physical pleasures. Likewise, I'm not sure he cockblocks Alcibiades because he isn't attracted to him but more that he is simply more interested at that moment in having a philosophical conversation. Physical pleasures aren't bad according to this theory, they're just not as good.

Speaking of mental pleasures, your homework:
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-be sure to put your ideas draft in the dropbox if you haven't already
-grammar exercises (recommended; I will post the answers later tonight)
-read Aristotle On the Soul 1.1, 1.4, 2.1-2.3, 3.4, 3.7 ( = pgs. 161-71, 194-96, 198-200)... warning... this is way harder than reading Plato
-read Sappho poems (Course Reader pg. 3)
-write a blog post in which you talk about one part of the Aristotle reading that seems to contradict with the theories of Plato/Socrates. Explain why you think it's a contradiction.