Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In the past few decades, Socratic irony has become obscured with controversy. Yet none of these arguments has examined their presuppositions about Socratic irony and whether this accurately describes Socrates' practice? In this essay, I argue we might better characterize Socrates with his strangeness (atopia) than with his irony (eironeia), and that this gives us a view of a Socratic practice different from one often taken as irony and one that also speaks to politics today.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: There is a long tradition in political theory that recognizes the right of a citizen, in limited circumstances, to disobey unjust laws. But standing athwart this tradition, or so it is widely believed, is the giant figure of Socrates, who, by means of his death and dialectic, supposedly argues in the Crito that justice requires absolute obedience to the laws of the state. However, complicating this picture of Socrates as the enemy of civil disobedience is his apparent insistence in the Apology that he would refuse to abandon the practice of philosophy even if the law should forbid it. _x000d_I defend two related conclusions. First, there is no inconsistency between the positions Socrates puts forth in the Apology and the Crito; and second, the reason there is no contradiction is that, contrary to the received view of Socrates, he does not in fact regard all instances of civil disobedience as unjust. Even if Socrates believes that justice forbids him to escape from prison, it is plausible to interpret his arguments as permitting some instances of civil disobedience, including peaceful violations of the law that occurred during the American civil rights movement.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: What use is Socrates for contemporary political theory? This essay argues for reconceptualizing Socratic activity as “paradoxical.” Socrates opens up the confines of reigning opinions, or doxai, through questioning and inquiry, offering only paradoxes by inhabiting contradictions and tensions within this discourse and helping his fellow citizens to see these in all their complexity. In this way, Socrates offers us a new mode of political thinking, one that works from within the thick context of the polis but that also calls into question this immanent perspective. This also points to a kind of critical creativity – the opening of ossified belief, discourse, and language which can in turn animate new ways of collective engagement; Socrates, this essay suggests, might bring life to our activity as political theorists and as citizens.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This essay explores the ways in which James Baldwin’s ceaseless confrontation with American innocence, his insistent honesty, and his disturbing depictions of the reality of racism in America both resembles and supplements the sting of perplexity that Socrates famously brought to Athenian citizens. For Baldwin, part of the business of the writer is “to examine attitudes, to go beneath the surface, to tap the source.” Like Socrates, Baldwin questions both himself and others not simply as a way to truth but as an ineluctable vocation. In doing so, I suggest that Baldwin not only illuminates what it might mean to act like Socrates today, but he also pushes the Socratic and the “examined life” beyond the banalities such phrases have become. By attacking the easy dogmatism and knowingness of racist America through tireless inquiry and self-examination, Baldwin both exemplifies a “black American Socrates” – in Cornel West’s words – and enhances it with a powerful sense of responsibility to the past and justice in the present. Moreover, just as Socrates challenged the spectrum of Athenians from slaves to metics to aristocrats for the sake of improving the polis life they held in common, Baldwin’s hope that American democracy might realize itself when all citizens can begin to acknowledge the delusions under which they have been living and change their lives accordingly holds the promise of egalitarian, strong democracy. Both Baldwin and Socrates, in other words, share a belief in every person’s duty to think, and thus to unsettle the deadness to ourselves and others which forestalls the development of more perfect democratic societies, whether in ancient Athens or the United States today.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In the Isocratic view the value of education is derived deductively from political doctrine.This lacks justification. The Socratic method as articulated in medieval Arabic interpretations of Socratic educational thought avoids these problems.