Oops, yes, hello and welcome Jar. I put your question aside last night because I didn't have the time to answer it, and I almost forgot to do it
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Originally Posted by Jar
First I´d like to stress do not be afraid of the same end of Socrates. Do you know he had been offered chance of escaping before he drank the poison? He refused to do so, ´cause he knew he had break the law.
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What gave you the impression that I was afraid of anything?
I am happy and proud (well, most of the time anyway) to live in a country where people don't get killed for their ideas.
I don't know how accurate is Wikipedia's description of the trial of Socrates, but based on that I rather got the impression that he got himself killed out of utter pig-headedness. Not only did he refuse to compromise with his fellow citizens, he deliberately provoked them. That's a rather stupid way to die for a philosopher, if you ask me.
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Originally Posted by Jar
1. Why do you think Plato´s Sokrates hated body and life?
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I have to admit that I was influenced in this by Michel Onfray's interpretation.
However, what I did see and didn't like in Plato's rendering of the dialogs was the insistence on a higher truth, and on an eternal life where we are supposed to get our rewards for living according to higher principles. This attitude comes together with a mistrust and contempt for reality, for life as we live it from day to day. I think it's a very destructive attitude. I personally like my day-to-day life. I don't need the promise of an afterlife to have a moral conduct. I'd much rather work on enjoying my life now, in the world I see and feel and know exists (even though I don't always fully understand it) than on submitting myself to imaginary higher principles based on an imaginary world. And, as I mentioned, I strongly believe that this kind of idealism, this mistrust and contempt for reality, has gotten quite enough people killed already. Including Socrates.
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Originally Posted by Jar
2. And what do you think is the essence of Christianity, for calling Sokrates a christian?
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I didn't call Socrates a christian, I said that some chistians "tried to make him an honorary christian" because they recognized similarities between their beliefs and his. Namely the belief in an afterlife where we are rewarded for our good deeds, and the contempt for this life that we do have.
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Originally Posted by Jar
3. question goes toward the language: What if those two words "art" and "theory" had back then a bit different meaning they have today?
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I used the word theory in its modern sense, I don't think Plato did it, it's my interpretation. Art is a word from Plato, and yes it has a different meaning from the one we generally understand, but I believe that when we say "the art of medicine" or "the art of cooking", we are still reasonably close to the meaning Plato had in mind. I may be wrong of course. I still believe I understood Plato's meaning about the difference between medicine and cooking, whether or not I got all the nuances of the word correctly. Do you disagree?
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Originally Posted by Jar
There is a dialogue called Parmenides you could enjoy. Sokrates is there very young and he is the one who listens and who is taught. His oponents are definitelly "able to rub two ideas together". I would say it can be see as a part of how he obtained his "metodology" even though the characters in this dialogue could never meet in real life. But does it matter?
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Thanks, I'll look it up
