WORKSHOP I: Socrates' Reputation
By Don Finkel
I. (15 minutes)
Writing individually, answer the following questions. To the best of your ability, give the answers you would have given prior to your reading of The Clouds. Base your answers on your impressions, your associations, your hunches, what you've heard, and your best guesses.
1. Who was Socrates? What did he do? Why is he famous? What were his motives? What were his aims?
2. Why, at age 70, was Socrates condemned to death and executed by the citizens of Athens (the real reason)?
3. What does "Socratic method" refer to or mean?
4. If a teacher were described as "Socratic," what would that tell you about that teacher?
II. (15 minutes) - Discussion of Part I. Hear answers, categorize them with labels, put categories on board.
III. (45 minutes): Divide into groups of four. Discuss and agree as a group on answers to the following questions. Individuals should record the answers in their own notebooks.
1. How would you characterize the character Socrates in Aristophanes' Clouds? Make a list of sentences or adjectives.
2. Compare your characterization with each of the categories on the board. Describe the "fit" or "lack of fit" with each.
3. In the fifth century B.C. in Greece, there arose a group of men who might be called the first "professors" or "professional liberal arts teachers." They were called, and called themselves, "Sophists." They traveled from city to city offering to teach--for a fee--aristocratic young men who aspired to a career in public life the crucial skills necessary to succeed. They were intellectuals, modern thinkers, and despite their differences, all offered to teach rhetoric, the art of persuasive public speech. Athens had never seen such a class of men and they were quite controversial; feelings in favor and against them ran rather high.
A second class of intellectuals were the men whom today we call the "Pre-Socratic philosophers," though, of course, they were not called that at the time. These were the first true philosophers in Greece, and they are best thought of as "natural philosophers" or the very first scientists. They were
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interested in and made daring speculations about the nature of the physical universe: the stars, the basic elements which make up all matter, the elemental forces that attract and repel, whether change is real or apparent, and more generally what kind of physical reality underlies the appearances present to our senses. This movement started in Ionia about a century before Socrates' generation but continued on through his lifetime (so that a number of the important Pre-Socratics are not "pre-Socratic" at all, but rather "con-Socratic").
In The Clouds, Aristophanes lumps Socrates with these two other groups of intellectuals. Plato, on the other hands, went to great lengths to distinguish Socrates from both groups, and, in particular, to oppose him to the Sophists.
Without, for now, worrying about which characterization is the fairest, what inferences can you draw from Aristophanes' play about the intellectual climate and issues of the day? Try to locate 3 - 6 specific issues and pin each of them down to a passage from the play.
4. Now, writing individually, go back to your original impressionistic "Socrates" from Part I, and guess where he stood or would stand on each of the specific issues your group isolated in question 3 above.
IV. (15 minutes): Discussion of Part III.