Euthyphro
1881
In the sweltering Athens of 399 BC, Socrates stands before the King Archon's court, awaiting trial for impiety. He encounters Euthyphro, a fellow citizen prosecuting his own father for murder. What begins as a simple question, what is piety?:becomes one of philosophy's most devastating interrogations. Socrates, with his signature patience and precision, dismantles Euthyphro's definitions one by one, each answer revealing new contradictions. The dialogue builds toward an impossible dilemma that has haunted theologians and ethicists for twenty-four centuries: Is something pious because the gods command it, or do the gods command it because it is pious? The dialogue ends without resolution, in the aporetic silence that marks so many of Plato's Socratic conversations. This is philosophy as lived practice, the terror of discovering that the foundations beneath your certainties are hollow. It is also a vivid portrait of Socrates himself: curious, relentless, unafraid to expose the gaps in his own understanding before facing a jury that will condemn him to death.
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“I am better off than he is,”
— Plato
“There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonable discourse.””
— Plato
“are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care for nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?””
— Plato
“I found that those who had the highest reputation were nearly the most deficient, while those who were thought to be inferior were more knowledgeable.””
— Plato
“To fear death, gentlemen, is no other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils.””
— Plato
“what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth?””
— Plato
“Virtue is the desire of things honorable and the power of attaining them.””
— Plato
“Imagine not being able to distinguish the real cause from that without which the cause would not be able to act as a cause.””
— Plato
“We should not become misologues, as people become misanthropes. There is no greater evil one can suffer than to hate reasonablediscourse. Misology and misanthropy arise in the same way. Misanthropy comes when a man without knowledge or skill has placed great trust in someone and believes him to be altogether truthful, sound, and trustworthy; then, a short time afterwards he finds him to be wicked and unreliable, and then this happens in another case; when one hasfrequently had that experience, especially with those whom one believed to be one’s closest friends, then, in the end, after many such blows, one comes to hate all men and to believe that no one is sound in anyway at all.””
— Plato
