Class Reflections: Plato's Apology

from our first real day of class

This is the first entry in a new set of posts I plan to write regularly throughout this semester on Tuesdays and Thursdays after I teach my morning class, while I’m sitting in my office at Marquette University

In our sessions earlier this week in my Foundations of Philosophy classes, we did the usual taking roll, introductions, going over the syllabus business, finishing up with a little exercise about ordinary life and means-ends reasoning. Today, you can say, we kicked things off for real, going into our first actual text for the class, Plato’s Apology.

There are a multitude of modalities and manners for teaching an Intro To Philosophy course (which is what Foundations is - Marquette just likes fancy names for their classes). In mine, I have students read actual primary texts in philosophy. I provide them with lots of resources (lesson pages, lecture videos, handouts, podcast episodes), and our class sessions are very dialogical and focused on not just figuring out what the texts have to tell us, but also how the ideas play out in our contemporary lives, experiences, problems, relationships, and culture.

I like to start with the Apology, because in it not only do we get introduced to this key figure in ancient philosophy, namely Socrates. We get to see him making a distinction between his younger accusers, those who brought the capital suit against him, and his older accusers, those who have produced and participated in a decades-long misrepresentation of him in Athenian society. We get the backstory of why he managed to tick so many powerful people off. And Plato provides us with an opportunity for reflection on who we think might actually possess some real knowledge or wisdom in our own society.

I pointed out to my students that in the Apology, we get an ancient example of a narrative device we’ve seen so many time that we might be a bit jaded about it. Socrates narrates his “origin story”. Before we looked at the one Plato has him provide, we talked briefly about super-hero “origin stories”. Then I shifted us back to something much more mundane, and gave them a thumbnail sketch of how I wound up in the very unlikely profession of a philosophy professor (a big surprise to people who knew me back in high school, in the Army, or even in college). And then I made the point to them that they are all early on in their own origin stories, and we speculated about what their own stories might look like 25 years from now.

Socrates’ own story famously involves a smart-ass buddy who asks the Oracle at Delphi “Is there anyone wiser than Socrates?” The answer is No, and that throws Socrates for a loop. He doesn’t feel or think of himself as particularly wise, and there do seem to be people in society who people say are wise (and who also think they are wise). So he goes and questions them.

Before we went on any further, we did a little exercise together. I asked them: “Who in our society would you take advice from for things that matter? Who do you think (or at least hope) has some knowledge or wisdom?” They came up with a number of answers, and we had some good discussion about some of them. Since I didn’t get certain answers that align with one of the groups that Socrates targeted, I changed the question a little bit: “Who are people in our society that you wouldn’t take advice or guidance from, because you’re smart and you know better, but lots of people unfortunately do listen to and consider to be wise?”

Immediately someone said “celebrities”, and then we had to clarify and break it down: What sorts of celebrities? There’s the ones who people do think are knowledgeable or wise, but who when you look closer really have nothing going for them other than great publicists, staff, and a lot of money to kick them off in playing guru. Then there’s those who actually have some talent, and are good at something, like musicians, artists, writers, and film/tv people. “Should you take advice about relationships from love songs?” I asked them. These people would be like the “poets” who Socrates went around to, asking them about the subjects referenced in their compositions, only to find out that they didn’t really understand them.

They also mentioned “athletes”, who would more likely map on to the “craftspeople” discussed in the Apology. These are people who do know something and can actually communicate their knowledge to others, but only in their field. A plumber (hopefully) knows a lot about pipes and fluid dynamics, but you don’t go to them for advice about relationships, because life ain’t all pipes. An athlete can be really good at what they do. They might even be a good team leader. But that doesn’t mean that they know anything about politics, medicine, or other fields (we recently had a professional quarterback who not only thought he knew about all sorts of stuff way outside of his knowledge base, but loved blathering on talk shows about that stuff, who has fortunately been replaced by someone a bit humbler though equally talented).

It was an excellent “first real” class, particularly for an 8 AM session. The students were clearly into it. Not only did we get through the ideas I’d wanted to get them engaging with. I also snuck in a more important meta-lesson that I’ll reinforce every class session. This philosophy stuff, even if it’s from more than 2,000 years ago, has direct connections to our own contemporary lives. It’s obviously up to me to do a lot of the “connect-the-dots” work at first. But before too long, at least some of them will start taking up that task for themselves.