In this episode Donald Robertson discusses Socrates’ definitions of justice and courage, his trial and execution, his role in Athenian society, and the importance of self-awareness and philosophical inquiry. The conversation also includes insights into cognitive behavioral techniques and how Socratic principles can be applied to modern life and therapy.
Episode Highlights:
15:05 Socrates and Modern Psychotherapy
28:57 Socrates’ Influence on Politics
39:47 The Socratic Method and Intellectual Humility
40:56 Socrates on Ignorance and Politicians
43:32 Self-Knowledge and the Role of Others
55:50 The Enduring Influence of Socrates
Donald Robertson is a writer, cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist, and expert in integrating ancient Stoic philosophy with modern evidence-based therapy. A founding member of Modern Stoicism and president of the Plato’s Academy Centre in Athens, he brings a unique interdisciplinary approach, blending philosophy, history, and psychology. Originally from Scotland, Donald practiced for over twenty years in London, specializing in social anxiety and confidence-building. He now divides his time between Greece and Canada, focusing on writing, public speaking, and consultancy. His work has been featured in Forbes, the BBC, and The Wall Street Journal, and his books inspire readers globally.
Learn more about Donald here: donaldrobertson.name
Episode Transcript:
00:44
Acta Non Verba is a Latin phrase that means actions, not words. If you want to know what somebody truly believed, don’t listen to their words instead, observe their actions. I’m Marcus Rilius Anderson and my guest today truly embodies that phrase. Donald Robertson is a cognitive behavioral therapist and the author of several incredible books on philosophy and psychotherapy, including How to Think Like a Roman Emperor and his latest book, How to Think Like Socrates, which we’ll be diving deep into. I highly recommend grabbing the book now.
01:13
And for those of you that don’t understand the connection between Socrates, the Stoics, et cetera, I think this conversation will be enlightening for you. Donald, thank you for being here. I looked at the very beginning, I look at that you have this for Hector and the virtues of his ancestors. Who’s Hector is? Hector’s my son. He’s 10 months old at the moment. And my wife is really into Greek stuff as well. Wanted to give him a Greek name.
01:43
But most Greek men nowadays are named after saints. So I was speaking to one of my Greek friends about it and he said, Hector, everyone says, all my friends in Greece say Hector’s a really good name, it’s a really good name. And so I said, how come none of you guys are called Hector though like you’ve all got, you know, you’re all called Yanis and stuff, right? You know, and others, you’re called after saints and stuff. How come nobody today is called Hector? And my buddy said, oh, that’s the kind of name that we would give to a dog. So, I know, like some.
02:11
My son’s got a name like Rover or something, I’m reliably told. But that’s kind of soots him. Like he’s a bit like a puppy dog. I’ll tell you a little story about him. My wife wanted to make sure that the first time he walked on his feet, he did it in the grounds among the ruins of Plato’s Academy. So we got a little video of him kind of walking through the grass among the ruins of Plato’s Academy in Athens.
02:41
That’s a beautiful mythology to start with his existence right there. It is. Yeah. I mean, how many people can say that? That’s tremendous. And I know that you’re doing a lot of work over there with the Players Academy, which we’ll talk a little bit more as well. But with Socrates, we were discussing this before. What do you think is the biggest misconception about him? Why do you think that he maybe, I wouldn’t say overlooked, but maybe doesn’t get as much, you know, plays some of the other ones? There’s a thing called the Socratic problem, right? Socratic problem.
03:07
This is one of the most fascinating people in history. There’s layers upon layers to him, everything about him is typically Greek and paradoxical and ironic. You know, he’s a much more complex figure than someone like Marcus Aurelius, for example. Marcus Aurelius is an interesting guy, but he’s pretty straightforward. Whereas Socrates, you feel like there’s kind of a lot more to unpack about what he’s saying and the type of person that he was and what he stood for. So the Socratic problem is the fact that he didn’t really leave any writings.
03:36
basically. Actually, we’ve got a couple of lines of poetry that are attributed to him, but we don’t have anything else. And even those, we’re not sure about their authenticity. We mainly know about him from three or four sources. There’s a couple of plays by Aristophanes that are satires, so present a kind of caricature of him that’s kind of unreliable, but it was written and performed during his lifetime. Then we have Plato’s dialogues, which are our main source.
04:05
36 or 37 dialogues from Plato, most of which feature Socrates. But Plato is generally believed to use Socrates as a mouthpiece for his own views and to do that more so as his career progresses as a writer. And then we’ve got dialogues from another of his students called Xenophon. We’ve got quite a lot of the Socratic dialogues from Xenophon that paint a slightly different picture from Plato. And then we have what’s called the anecdotal tradition. We’ve got all these later
04:34
of anecdotes and little quips about things that Socrates said or did that are considered a really mixed reliability. So the reason that we don’t know more about him specifically is that he’s kind of hidden behind this cloud in a way or you know mist. You know it’s hard to kind of see the real Socrates behind what Plato has written, what Xenophon’s written. That’s why when I wrote about it I found it incredibly frustrating because I thought there’s an amazing story here about Socrates.
05:04
But people don’t get told it. Classicists are kind of aware of it because it’s hard to tell because there’s like gaps in it and there’s ambiguities in it and there’s contradictions in it. So nobody sits down normally and just says, here’s like a version of the story of who Socrates was. So one way of doing that is to say, listen, let’s set aside the question of who the real Socrates was.
05:29
and just tell the story that we’re told by Plato and Xenophon and others, sometimes called the literary character of Socrates. What’s the story about Socrates that’s been handed down to us? And even to tell that story, we need to kind of deal with some issues. It’s kind of complicated. It involves a lot of characters. So we maybe need to simplify it a little bit. I approached it really like I was making a dramatized version for a movie or a TV series. So I thought we’re going to have to simplify it a little bit.
05:59
We’re going to have to gloss over some things. We’re going to have to fill in some gaps. With this certain things where we’re going to have to choose option A or option B, like we can’t tell the story both ways. We have to make a decision one way or the other. And I think that’s why more people don’t know more about Socrates because the story was difficult to tell for those reasons. And it means making some kind of tough decisions about how we’re going to choose to portray him.
06:29
And it’s a complicated story. So I think that’s why. And I guess the other reason is Socrates was mainly known for asking questions rather than teaching didactically. The Stoics provide something that’s almost more like a bullet point list of ideas that are implicit in Socrates. Here’s the kind of dummies guide to Socrates, as it were, the simplified version. And that’s incredibly useful. And I don’t think Socrates would be completely
06:58
you know what he’s doing is much more complex, it involves kind of asking a lot more nuanced questions, you know sometimes it’s famously inconclusive, you know he wants us to think about things and kind of spiral out round the question but it isn’t necessarily going to kind of spin feed us the answers. For those reasons I think you know people don’t know as much about Socrates as they should and I think another reason funnily enough I mentioned, sometimes explanation might seem a bit odd but in all honesty…
07:27
If you go into a bookshop and you kind of grab the first book by Plato that you find it’s probably going to be The Republic, because that’s Plato’s masterpiece, his magna mopus, right? It’s one of our main sources. But The Republic is really long. And it’s not exactly easy to read. Yeah, it’s not easy to read. So a lot of people would pick that up and get, you know, like a couple of chapters into it.
07:54
typically and then kind of get derailed or give up. So I think often in reality, people don’t really have a good access point, a good on-ramp to start learning about Socrates and approaching it in terms of his life and character. And then I suppose another thing which we might kind of touch on is the way that both Xenophon and Plato talk about him, there are many odd things about it.
08:23
But one of the odd things is although they often portray him in the company of famous Athenians and other famous Greeks, and he’s kind of portrayed mainly through dialogues, so they’re kind of like little plays that connect him to the events that surround him. Nevertheless, Socrates is portrayed as this elderly philosopher strolling through pleasant groves, talking in fairly abstract terms about stuff.
08:51
you wouldn’t guess that he’s living, and these dialogues are often taking place, in the middle of a huge war, an enormous political turmoil that’s unfolding around him, that he’s fighting in, ultimately he’s a veteran hoplite. Probably I have sought he’s kind of pegged as almost being like a sergeant major.
09:19
you know, he’s quite an experienced soldier. He’s talking to senior officers a lot in a lot of detail about strategy, training and tactics. You know, he’s not just your kind of average soldier. Like he seems like a little bit more, to have a little bit more responsibility, training and competence. So we don’t normally, you know, get this idea about the whole picture. We get a slightly more abstract version of Socrates that’s handed down to us for some reason.
09:48
And the weird thing is when we know, when we learn about his life story, it’s pretty amazing. You know, it would make an awesome movie. That’s what I’m saying. I think this should be a screenplay. We should get it out there. And back to that notion that you were discussing about the how the military influenced the way that he does things. Again, we can have a plan, we can have no objective, we can have a mission, but the enemy will always have a vote in the fight. So I love the way that you were mentioning that he does where he just often opens it up. It’s kind of abstract.
10:18
And it’s more of this experiential mentality because when he’s able to ask this person something specifically to them, now they’re more invested and now they can connect the dots to their emotion, how they feel what’s going on, what’s really happening. You have many tremendous cognitive behavioral therapy sort of techniques here, which, you know, where’s the evidence that this is true? Where’s the evidence that this is false? How much of this is the semantics of my own emotions, et cetera, which allows that detachment and that third person perspective, which…
10:47
Oftentimes we don’t feel like we have the luxury of whether it be in combat or in conversation with somebody. This is another paradox that you’re kind of touching on here. Although I’ve said that Socrates seems kind of abstract, like he’s walking through these pleasant groves talking about quite complex philosophical matters. At the same time, he’s the most grounded of all philosophers because he’s always talking to other people and he’s typically addressing their genuine practical concerns.
11:17
important political historic decisions like statesmen, military commanders and things like that he’s talking to. He talks to generals about their definition of bravery for example and it’s a very concrete thing. Like he says to Niccius and Lackeys you know what is courage and they define it as, I can’t remember which one comes first, but one of them defines it as staying in formation and standing your ground.
11:45
And the reason they define it that way is they’re mainly thinking in very concrete terms about the phalanx and how it’s absolutely crucial to the Athenian hoplites that they remain in tight formation because the guy holding each soldier holding a shield is also protecting the guy to his left with it as well. And so to break formation, you endanger yourself, but you also endanger the guy standing beside you. And so they had to kind of really drum.
12:13
this into the hoplites that they’ve got to stay in this tight formation is the key to their success and stuff. And so he says that’s a good definition of courage. But what about if you’re serving in the cavalry? Like then standing your ground and staying in formation isn’t like really accurate. You charge into the middle of the enemy and break their formation. He says, well, what about the Spartans? They don’t fight like that. They apparently charge into the enemy. He says, what if you’re fighting a tactical retreat?
12:41
Why, and you’re not in that kind of formation. What if it’s in civilian life? Like, what does courage mean if we’re not even talking about the military? So Socrates typically gets people to realize that their definitions of concepts that are really important to them at a practical level are usually too narrow or too rigid. And he encourages them to think a lot more flexibly about it and question things. No.
13:05
like we would today in philosophy in quite an abstract way, but he starts off by talking about stuff that’s of genuine practical concern to them in their daily lives. So yeah, I should say like Socrates was known, rightly or wrongly, this is a bit of an oversimplification, but in the ancient world, they would say Socrates was unique because he was the first philosopher, he wasn’t the first philosopher ever, but he was the first philosopher to bring philosophy down to earth.
13:32
The philosophers that preceded him were kind of more metaphysical. They studied the planets. They were proto-scientists. Like Socrates was known for being the first philosopher to take the philosophical method and really apply it to our values in everyday life in a very concrete, practical way. They don’t quite phrase it like this, but you could say he’s the first philosopher to really use the question and answer method of dialect.
14:00
or what we call the Socratic method, in a psychotherapeutic way. I mean, the best example of that, maybe even as in Xenophon’s dialogues, which are a lot simpler and shorter usually than Plato’s, in several occasions we literally see Socrates talking to his friends, even his family members, even his teenage son, about anger. And he’s applying the Socratic method to their anger towards other people.
14:29
So he really seems like a psychotherapist. He really does. And you have some great stuff in there about this idea of, you know, the two-column technique method to look at that you were discussing earlier about this anger. You know, how is that serving you? What is that doing? Usually it’s essentially a form of rumination, which is almost this selfish idea of making yourself the hero and the victim of what happened to this other person who wronged you or gave you this injustice. Yeah.
14:56
There’s a lot we could say about anger in the ancient world. It was considered really one of the main emotions that we should be interested in talking about. Let me just step back for a minute and say a little bit about that two column technique. Cause I wanted to say things, but Socrates people maybe weren’t aware of. I thought most people probably don’t haven’t read Plato, right? Cause like I said, they don’t really have an on-ramp to get access to it.
15:21
But I mean, hopefully by reading this book, then they get interested and they could go off and read Plato’s Apology, for example, the Symposium or the First Book of the Republic and stuff. So I wanted to point out things that people often get wrong. So one of them is, or they might surprise people, people think that Socrates never wrote anything. And that’s basically true. Like I said, Plato tells us that Socrates wrote some poetry when he was in prison. And we’ve got like a couple of lines that were attributed to him. They’re a bit questionable.
15:51
But there’s also this really weird passage in Epictetus. Now Epictetus, the stoic philosopher, is living, what, about 400 or 500 years later. He loves Socrates, idolizes him. He says a number of odd things to his students about Socrates. One of them is that he says the main thing that you guys could learn from Socrates is, and he doesn’t say some abstract philosophical theory, he says how to discuss philosophy without it ending up in a quarrel.
16:19
how to avoid quarrels and arguments. That’s an odd thing to attribute to Socrates. Very interesting that he should say that. That it was much more important in the ancient world than it is today. The other thing he says is that Socrates wrote more than most other philosophers. And then he says something quite strange about that. He says, but he didn’t write things for publication. He left that to his students because they wanted to become famous by publishing dialogues and things. He says Socrates only wrote things for his own personal use.
16:49
He wrote copious private notes, like where he was always focusing on questions of self-improvement. So it really sounds like he’s saying Socrates engaged in something that I guess modern readers would be tempted to call self-improvement journaling, right? Something along those lines. And there are a number of other references in the dialogues to Socrates doing things, continuing his philosophical method in private. There’s a passage.
17:18
And one of Plato’s dialogues for Socrates is shown saying that once he’s finished debating with other people and he goes home, he carries on the process of using the Socratic method in his imagination. He says there’s another Socrates that waits for, he phrases it in an odd, typically odd way. He says, there’s this old guy that’s hiding in my house and he ambushes me when I go home and you’re like, geez, why can’t you just tell us? Just speak normally, right? He says, there’s this old guy. And then he…
17:47
And this old guy turns out to be his alter ego. It’s like another version of Socrates, an imaginary Socrates that really criticizes him and questions his assumptions more rigorously and stuff. So he engages in these imaginary debates, which is perhaps what he was writing down if Epictetus is right about this. And I thought, jeez, if only we knew what Socrates is writing down in these private notes, and there’s a clue.
18:13
I don’t know whether this is right or not, but there’s a hint that I wanted to talk about in the book because it excited me for other reasons. And one of Xenophon’s dialogues, Socrates, is shown talking to a young guy called Euthydemus, and this guy’s a self-improvement junkie. He’s got a huge library of books from wise men. And Socrates gets him to realize that he hasn’t actually made much progress though, and he teaches him a philosophical method.
18:41
that consists in drawing a diagram with two columns. And so you think, well, to me, this jumps out immediately because it looks exactly like something that we do in cognitive therapy. We’re always doing two-column diagrams on flip charts. And classicists never mention it because they’re reading Socrates from a slightly different perspective. For me, like for a psychologist or a therapist to read Socrates, there’s other things methodologically in terms of the ideas that he’s employing that are going to leap out into the foreground.
19:09
that wouldn’t strike an academic philosopher or classicist as being that important. But no one ever mentions this, but it leapt out to me immediately. I thought he’s describing a two-column technique that he’s literally drawing in front of this guy. And then the importance of it became more obvious to me because he says to this young man, this is how you do philosophy. He’s teaching and it’s his first step. So it’s the first exercise that he’s giving this guy to develop a skill.
19:38
that he obviously uses. It’s clearly the same skill that he employs in the Socratic method in verbal discussion and dialogues. And so what he does is get him to list definitions of justice and injustice in the two columns. He starts with injustice because it’s easier often for people to clarify vices or things that they think are negative rather than to identify their positive values.
20:08
If you say to people today in values work, what are the qualities you most admire in other people? Some individuals, particularly people who are depressed, will say, I don’t know. I just don’t know what my values are. I’ve got no idea. But then if you listen to them, they often complain about, usually, in all honesty, politicians, right? So everybody hates some politician or other, right? Or there’s other people that they can’t stand. And…
20:36
you know, this guy, I just can’t believe this guy is such a hypocrite and he’s still lacking in integrity and blah, blah, blah. I can’t stand people that do this. And you think that that reveals your values, right? You’re telling us, you know, what the opposite would be. So you’re talking about the things that you think are bad or vices. If you just flip that around, so you hate hypocrisy, like that suggests that you really value integrity. I guess I hadn’t really thought about it later. That’d be much more useful.
21:05
if you looked at it the other way around and focused on the positive qualities that you do admire, and then maybe started to think about are there any individuals at all that you think exhibit any integrity that it might be worth reflecting on and modeling. So Socrates sometimes starts with the negative, in this case injustice, and they agree things like stealing and lying and stuff like that. But then what Socrates does next is the beginning of the Socratic method, the first step.
21:35
He says, okay, so stealing, what if an elected general, the Athenians elected their generals, what if an elected general stole the weapons of the, seized the weapons from the enemy in war? And Euthydemus says, well, that wouldn’t really be unjust. I mean, that’s different, right? Like that’s like an exception. And Soxie says, well, what if he lied to the enemy? And to see, well, yeah, okay, that’s not necessarily injustice either, right? That’s a bit different.
22:03
And then so they refine their definition. They say, okay, so maybe justice consists in lying to your enemies and telling the truth to your friends, right? And Socrates says, sure. What if you’re a father and you’re trying to give medicine to a small child though, and they won’t take it, right? Unless you hide it in their food. Is that injustice? Like, and Euthydemus says, well, that’s different, right? It’s an exception. And Socrates says, what if your friend is suicidal?
22:33
and he’s going to kill himself and he asks you where you’ve hidden his dagger. Like should you tell him the truth? This is an example that keeps coming up in the history of philosophy, right? Like should you lie to someone or tell them a white lie if it saves their life? You know, people disagree about it, but in this case Euthydemus is like, oh, okay, yeah, that’s an exception, right? It would be just to lie to him and tell him you don’t know where the dagger is because he’s not on his right frame of mind. So Socrates is taking these kind of simplistic definitions and getting people to think through the exceptions to them.
23:02
Right? And this is, so he says, under what circumstances would lying move from one column marked headed injustice to the other column marked justice? And you can do this with, you know, like any concept really, I think any of our values. It’s just encouraging us to think more deeply. And by using this little diagram, it’s developing a skill that we can use and debate with other people. But the psychological significance of this is much more profound than it seems at first.
23:31
Because in modern psychotherapy, we know that there’s a problem with what’s called role-governed behavior, where people are taught, or they somehow develop a kind of role that they follow in life. Like, you should always speak your mind, for example. Like, so people have these roles, or like, strategies that they use to cope with life in the stressful situations, right? But the problem is they apply them to rigidly, right?
24:00
So the rules don’t seem false. Often they seem self-evident. They seem like common sense. So of course you should speak your mind. Right, it’s a great idea until it isn’t. Right? In some situations, maybe it would be better just to keep your mouth shut. Or in some situations it may be better to speak more tactfully. Or in some situations it might be better to wait until in a more appropriate time, right? So any good strategy can be applied foolishly and backfire. So that Socrates was all…
24:29
about this idea that slogans and maxims and strategies in themselves do not constitute wisdom. You know, if you give them to a foolish person, they’ll apply them foolishly. But if you give them to a wise person, they’ll apply them more flexibly and adaptively. Like, so is it justice? You know, justice consists in always telling the truth. Injustice is lying. Well, maybe reality is a little bit more nuanced than that, right? And so a wise person would understand these, the nuance and the exceptions.
24:58
And you’re going to get into problems if you think that you can deal with situations ethically or in terms of psychologically, in terms of coping with stress, if you apply coping strategies too rigidly. In therapy, this is a very familiar problem because almost every client we meet has strategies that make sense to them, that they think are helping.
25:24
actually the therapist can see our on closer inspection contributing to the problem, right? But often that’s because what seems to work in the short term backfires in the long term, right? You know, so getting people to think a little bit more deeply about what they’re doing, you know, maybe thinking about what might be a more nuanced alternative is crucial in therapy. And this is exactly what Socrates is. This is part of his beef with the sophists as well. These intellectuals that kind of
25:54
preceded to the previous generation, although this movement continued during his lifetime and throughout the ancient world to some extent. So the Socracists would give speeches rather than engaging in the question and answer method that philosophers were more known for. And they would teach slogans. And Socrates thought this was too passive, that people would just kind of memorize what the Socracists were saying without really understanding it. And then they would regurgitate it.
26:23
as a, you know, a role for life, a moral slogan, and it was too rigid and too simplistic. The people weren’t really learning how to think for themselves. And he also thought this was a problem with books. Like he thought, whether you’re listening to a speech or reading a book, the problem is that you’re just getting opinions and then parroting them. But you haven’t really done the groundwork to understand how those opinions are arrived at. He said, when I question people about these things, they, you know,
26:52
over and over again what I find is they don’t really understand the stuff that they’re saying. It falls apart really quickly. And so he thought it was a… And one of Plato’s dialogues, he seeks out Protagoras, the first sophist, and he says to him, I need to speak to you because I’m speaking to all these other people that are just kind of repeating what you say and it’s pointless because they don’t even understand how you arrived at these ideas. So I need to go straight to the horse’s mouth and find out, like, how did you…
27:20
exactly arrive at these ideas and how do you justify them and how do you deal with these potential criticisms for example. It’s the difference in Socrates’ eyes between opinion and genuine knowledge or understanding and we find the same problem today is very prevalent in psychotherapy. People kind of latch on to coping strategies or rules that they follow overly rigidly unconditionally and it often backfires like they need to take being curious to take
27:50
what seems like common sense initially, in order to really understand, you know, maybe there’s a more subtle way of dealing with the problems that they face. Absolutely. And I love that you say that potentially, I mean, it’s probably destroyed now, but essentially there’s almost the equivalent of what Marcus Aurelius meditations would be from Socrates to hear him breaking these things down. And I also love that you talk about the complexities, right? Marcus Aurelius, obviously we both love him and we love what he talks about.
28:19
yet we saw being a position that he was in, the pressure that he was under, this is what he believed. I mean, it’s written down, it’s in black and white, yet he still had to modify some of those actions in those times to try to create. It’s like none of these and being the emperor back then, every decision he made was difficult. It was often a choice of which is the lesser of two evils or what is going to outbalance this other potentiality. And I think that people, again, it’s easy to say, well,
28:49
this didn’t work, he was a hypocrite here. It’s like, it’s very easy to say for us after the fact in a warm, safe environment 2000 years later. Gosh, there’s something I want to say about this, it’s what Socrates, there’s a kind of undercurrent here, because Marcus Aurelius was very aware of the Socratic dialogues. And one of the big issues that Socrates addressed is, is the idea of people seeking political power who don’t understand the nature of justice.
29:18
And something that Socrates would often highlight things that are so simple, they’re kind of embarrassing. Like he’d ask people questions that made him feel awkward. So to people, he’d often meet people who were aspiring politicians. And he’s, to cut a long story short, he’d say things to them like, how much time have you spent studying the nature of justice? And they’d say, well, you know, I haven’t really, you know, and Socrates would say, but you’re going to be in a position where you’re making decisions for the whole of society. So shouldn’t you have spent some time studying?
29:48
what’s good for the whole society. Otherwise it would be like you were seeking the role of being a medical advisor to the state, but you haven’t studied medicine, for example, what’s good for the health of the body. Like if you haven’t studied what’s good psychologically or morally for the whole of the city of Athens, how could you possibly take responsibility for advising the assembly, like for becoming a political leader? Now,
30:17
It’s an interesting question, right? So you would assume that somebody who’s seeking political power would have studied what’s in the best interests or what’s in the welfare of society. But if you look at, you could ask this question of politicians today, you go, I don’t know, how much time has this guy spent studying, like, or trying to understand what’s in the best interests of society? Like most politicians today, I guess the answer to that would be zero.
30:45
I mean that’s pretty shocking when you think about it, right? That’d be like somebody wanted to become a doctor who hasn’t spent any time studying anatomy and physiology. That’s the kind of analogy that Socrates uses. And when he talks to people, they’re usually not feeling quite embarrassed and quite awkward. He says, so you’ve not spent any time at all. You know, you’ve not read any books on this. You’ve never done any courses on it. You’ve never attended any lectures trying to kind of explore what’s…
31:14
in the best interests of society, and yet you want to be the one that’s advising people on that. It doesn’t really make any sense because people see politics as a game where the goal is just to get as much power as possible. It’s almost like they don’t take it seriously enough. But Marcus Aurelius had read this, so he understood the gravity of what Socrates was saying. So Marcus Aurelius is an exception, right? Marcus Aurelius, if you asked…
31:42
Did Marcus Aurelius study what justice was? Yeah, he spent years studying jurisprudence and stoic philosophy, right? Did he study what was in the interests of society? Yeah, like, I mean, he spent his entire life like studying what stoic philosophy says about the goal of life, what it says about society, you know, what it says about psychopathology and the emotional problems that we encounter. Like, so he was preparing himself to take up that position.
32:11
of responsibility. He wanted to really understand human nature and the nature of society. Otherwise, how could he possibly pass laws and give advice to people? He cared about what was actually an interest of society. Whereas other people that get involved in politics, if you look at it from that point of view, there’s no evidence that they actually care at all about what it is that they’re trying to achieve.
32:40
I mean, the philosophy before him, I mean, where did Socrates come up with this? We have Sophists, we have all these other kind of methodologies, if you will. Where did his come from? And talk about his past, because we see that it isn’t always a glamorous rise to this level of understanding. So Socrates was executed in 399 BCE, and he was just over, he was in his early 70s, we’re told when that happened, right? So Socrates was not the first philosopher.
33:10
There were earlier philosophers of several different traditions. And even at Athens, there was a philosopher that preceded him called Anaxagoras, who came from what would now be the coast of Turkey. So we tend to think, I mean, a lot of the people that we think of as Greek philosophers actually came from the wider Greek world and parts of the world that are not in modern day Greece, for example. So Anaxagoras was a foreigner.
33:39
and he was one of the natural philosophers. So the main kind of traditions, not the only one, there are many traditions, but the main traditions at Athens were the natural philosophers and the sophists and Thymus and Socrates. And the natural philosophers were kind of proto-scientists. They wanted to give physical causal explanations of everything. Socrates thought that was about reductionist and it wasn’t really that helpful in terms of giving us moral advice or psychological advice.
34:07
They studied the stars, they studied the nature of animals and things. They wanted to know how earthquakes and thunderstorms happened and things like that. But Socrates thought, well, how does that help us to know what to do when we’re facing a moral dilemma? And the Sophists weren’t interested in the truth. They just wanted to know how to win arguments. And the Sophists became… Their name, Sophistes, means a wise man or an expert.
34:37
So these guys claimed to be wise, and they charged huge amounts of money, and they often became advisors to politicians because they taught rhetoric. So they would teach people how to win arguments, regardless of whether what you’re saying is true or false. Some of the sophists would even say, it doesn’t matter what the truth is. You know, all that really matters is being able to win arguments. Socrates’ famous analogy for this from the dialogue called Gorgias, I’ll mention because…
35:06
Everyone always thinks this is really interesting. So he’s having this long-winded debate with Gorgias, who’s one of the most famous sophists, a really exceptional orator, public speaker, and speechwriter, or rhetorician. And Gorgias doesn’t really care, or seem to care about the truth. He just is interested in rhetoric and winning arguments. And Socrates says, to me, rhetoric seems like it’s not.
35:33
The discussion starts because one of his friends raises the question whether rhetoric is an art and what sort of art it is. And so he says, I don’t think it is an art or a science. I think it’s more like a knack. And I call it a knack because it’s not based, rhetoric isn’t based on studying the topic that you’re talking about. Right? Retroactions would talk about, would learn how to win an argument about health or about economics, but not by studying health or economics. Right? They study the methods of persuasion.
36:03
In fact, God just says you can win an argument on any subject by only studying one subject, which is how to manipulate the conversation, right? You don’t actually need to know anything. And Socrates is like, you know, obviously this should be setting alarm bells, right? Right. And this could be dangerous. So he says it’s to that, because what you’re basing it on is how people respond, whether they agree with you or whether they disagree with you, rather than actually studying the truth about the subject.
36:33
He says, for that reason, it reminds me of being a confectioner, like being somebody who makes, like being a chocolatier or, you know, somebody who makes pastries or cakes or something like that. He said, because you’re trying out different recipes and you’re not studying physiology or nutrition in order to figure out what ingredients you should put in. You’re trying stuff that seems to taste nice and then you give it to people and if they like it, then you make more of it, right? So it’s a knack.
37:01
It’s just based on feedback from the audience. So there’s no attempt to try and figure out the truth independently of what people say tastes nice. And rhetoric is like that. You’re figuring out what audience was… You’re telling them whatever they’ll agree with. You’re figuring out how to get their applause. And it’s obviously like social media today. The sophists were guided by literally
37:30
how much applause they could get from the audience. They’d have competitions to see who would get the biggest round of applause. It’s like getting likes or attention or views on social media. It’s a vanity metric, yeah. Yeah, so you’re gonna, in plain English, it forces you to sell out, because you’re gonna learn to say whatever gets the biggest reaction from your audience. And the sophists quickly figured out that greed, fear, and anger
38:00
were easy levers to pull in order to get more engagement from their audience, right, by whipping them up and playing on their emotions. And so he says, you guys are like confectioners, basically. You know, you’re just kind of giving people stuff regardless of whether it’s good or bad for their health. It’s whatever they, you know, they find most appealing or most attractive. Whereas a physician would study nutrition.
38:27
And he might tell people to, they should follow a diet that like the, you know, isn’t tasty initially, but it might be the best one for their health. Right. And he said, Socrates says something very interesting. He said, imagine a confectioner and a nutritionist, as we would say, or he says a physician are talking to an audience of children, I, people who are completely ignorant of the subject of nutrition, right. And easily manipulated. He said the confectioner would win every time.
38:57
like if they were having a debate, like there’s no way that he would be able to convince them. Like, you know, the nutritionist would convince them that they should eat this stuff that tastes really bland or, you know, like the confectioner has got all these colorful, exciting, tasty things. He’s gonna win even time every time. Although what he’s giving them is bad for their health. It’s gonna make all their teeth fall out, right?
39:18
But if they’re children, they don’t know anything about nutrition, like they’re not questioning things in the same way, they’re going to be easily manipulated. And Socrates is basically saying that’s the problem that he faces, you know, because he’s trying to get to the truth, but he’s kind of battling against people that are just using strategies to manipulate the fear, anger and greed of the uneducated audience that he’s dealing with, such as the jury that voted to have him executed, for instance.
39:47
Yeah. And so the Socratic method is essentially a way to combat any of that sort of rhetoric or even this sort of mentality to, because it forces us, like you said, this attachment, this third person perspective, and even writing down in columns. Again, what is that doing? It’s forcing me to step away from this emotion or this situation, put it on paper. And now I have additional dimension at this lens to wish to see the reality of what’s actually happening.
40:14
And also a key part of the Socratic method is spotting contradictions in our thinking. So Socrates thought that by really examining our thinking very carefully and pinpointing contradictions, then at least we would figure out that we were wrong or ignorant. We can’t be right about something if we’re contradicting ourselves about it. He thought that should make us reflect and realize and either get to the truth ourselves or realize that we should consult an expert.
40:43
Because if I’m riddled with contradictions and I can’t get past them, at least maybe I should find somebody who knows more about the subject that could potentially advise me. So it’s an exercise in overcoming intellectual conceit. Socrates famously said that ignorance in itself isn’t particularly dangerous. You know, he said, if I don’t know anything about medicine, for example, but I know that I’m ignorant, then knowing that I’m ignorant should motivate me.
41:12
to go and consult an expert, right? It’s not that big of a problem, right? The real problem, the much more serious problem would be what Socrates calls double ignorance, which is when I’m ignorant about medicine, but I believe that I’m an expert, right? And then he says, because now, right, rather than seeking advice from someone else, I’ll be guided by my own ignorance into making mistakes and contradicting myself. And in particular, if I’m a politician,
41:42
and I’m advising the entire state about stuff that I believe that I know that in fact I do not know, then that’s really dangerous. It’s like, that’s got the maximum potential for harm. So the double ignorance of politicians is the most serious problem that society faces or the intellectual arrogance or the conceit of politicians. So believing that they know what’s good for society or believing that they know what’s just without ever having spent any time
42:11
actually studying or researching those subjects would be toxic, right? Well, that’s exactly the situation that most societies find themselves in, right? Like we typically elect people who think they know what’s good or what’s right for society, but have spent zero time actually attempting to study or understand that subject. Like consulting somebody who believes that they’re an expert in medicine but has never actually gone to medical school. That’s risky, right? That’s a recipe for disaster.
42:41
He doesn’t say specifically in here, but this shows us confirmation biases. He just shows us cognitive dissonance and this shows us that friction there and how we can sometimes justify because we have this incongruency at times. And it’s like, well, in order for me to have this intellectual peace, I had to justify it in this situation. And now we have this, it’s corrosive for us internally if we don’t do that word. I think he probably, he understands the idea of bias.
43:08
There’s a theme that runs through ancient literature, which again is often overlooked. It’s in Socrates and it’s in people that are influenced by him, like the Stoics and Galen talks about this particularly. So Socrates seems to think that there’s a famous maxim that’s engraved outside the temple of Apologo at Delphi that says, gnoth aes c outon, which means no nice felf. And this is a cliche, but it’s hugely important in ancient philosophy. Socrates thinks self-knowledge is really important.
43:38
But he also thinks we have a kind of blind spot for ourselves. We don’t really understand our own strengths and weaknesses properly. Socrates seems to believe that we need other people and to engage in discussion with other people in order to be able to view ourselves more objectively. He says it’s by kind of critiquing other people’s beliefs and opinions, we develop a better understanding of our own. He famously says,
44:06
know thy, imagine that know thyself is like as if the god Apollo had commanded the eye to see itself. He said how can the eye possibly see itself unless it looks in a mirror, for example. And he said but then what would the mirror be for the human soul? And he says well another person who is being honest with us and has you know similar values, similar beliefs, you know but is willing to subject them to
44:36
questioning and criticism, right? So by helping other people to really reflect on and question their beliefs and doing it collaboratively with them, we can gain more insight into our weaknesses, our own biases, you know, by using them as a kind of sounding board or a mirror. And this really resonated with me because we find us in coaching and therapy. You know, if you’re a coach or a therapist, you benefit a lot from the insights that your clients achieve.
45:05
because it’s hard for people. We have these blind spots and biases that make it hard for us to do self-improvement. But by helping other people and noticing that they typically get in certain problems and make certain errors, you might think, I guess maybe I’m doing this as well. Maybe these mistakes that these clients are making, or I’ve watched that I didn’t fall into the same trap. So helping other people is a way of gaining self-knowledge, self-awareness.
45:34
Socrates seems very aware of this problem and this is a kind of potential solution. Absolutely and it comes back to that Epictetus quotes about what we could learn from Socrates, which is the capacity for you and I because your intention for me is to make me better. So you want to point out these areas of weakness or push back against these areas that don’t have a lot of structure and I understand that your intention is to help me so that allows me to dethrone my ego.
46:01
to step back and listen to what you’re saying as opposed to allowing my back to get up, pushing back out of just sort of that, you know, respondents kind of ideal. I’ll tell you my other favorite story about Socrates. He, we mentioned earlier that Socratic method is all about highlighting contradictions in our thinking and errors in our reasoning, right? And actually one of the ways he does this is very simple, but it’s often overlooked by people. It’s a famous concept that runs through the history of philosophy. I think,
46:30
we can see Socrates applying what Christian authors tend to call the Golden Rule. We see it in the Stoics as well. So people sometimes say, I like Stoicism and I’m interested in Socrates, but I don’t really understand how to apply it to everyday ethics at a practical level. You know, it seems kind of a little bit confusing and a little bit abstract, but the Golden Rule is famously simple. It’s a piece of cake. Just don’t treat others in ways that you don’t want to be treated. It’s not rocket science.
46:57
There’s a sense in which it’s incredibly simple, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, right? It’s not the whole story. It’s a bit more nuanced than that, but it’s a starting point at the very least, you know, don’t do things to other people that you wouldn’t want them to do to you basically. So, the way Socrates illustrates this, I’ll give you an example. He says a young man comes to see him called Cretobulus.
47:28
who’s the son of actually one of Socrates’ best friends, Crito. And he’s probably about 15 years old, and he’s kind of just embarking on adult life, kind of wants to meet people. And Socrates knows everybody in Athens, you know, is rich and poor, like foreigners and Athenians alike. And he says, Socrates, you could introduce me to some influential people, right? And he’s networking, basically, right? And I want to make good friends. And Socrates said, sure.
47:56
And in typical Socratic fashion, Rowland is doing it. He says, well, define a friend. What is it? Well, that’s a good friend. And Kretoblus pretty easily is able to say, well, they wouldn’t lie to you. They wouldn’t steal from you. They come and visit you when you’re sick. And he rattles off a bunch of characteristics that a good friend would exhibit. It’s not that difficult. And then Socrates says, how many of those qualities do you exhibit yourself?
48:26
And Kretobolis is like, well, not very many, right? And Stokty says, haven’t you got this whole conversation back to front then? Shouldn’t you? Because if you’re not a good friend and you want me to introduce you to people that are, that’s going to work out badly, right? Because they’re going to resent me as a kind of matchmaker, not trust me again in the future, and they’re going to see through you eventually, right? Wouldn’t they have made more sense to ask me
48:56
how you could become a good friend, right? And to work on, and he said, if you had all of those qualities that you just described to me a moment ago, people would be falling over themselves to introduce you to other good people in society and influential people in society. So you should start by improving yourself. Otherwise, it’s like you’re asking me to deceive people. Right, you’re saying you’re not a good friend, but you want me to present you to people as if you were.
49:25
Right. So rather than, you know, you should focus on the reality or the slogan that people attribute to Soprites is that we should be as we wish to appear. You want to seem like a good friend. You want me to tell people you’re a good friend. It would be better for you to actually be a good friend rather than trying to appear like a good friend. Right. Be as you wish to appear in reality. It’s that Epictetus quote, right?
49:53
Don’t tell me your philosophy embody it. Like I should know your quality by your actions, yes? Yeah, it’s a similar idea. But this is also what we call in cognitive therapy, the double standards technique, right? So, cryptobolus has a double standard for friendship. Like he applies one standard to other people and another standard to himself. It’s a contradiction. You know, you put it bluntly, he’s a hypocrite, right? And Socrates draws his attention to that hypocrisy, a double standard.
50:21
And by ironing that out, he’s beginning to develop a philosophy that’s more like the golden rule, like that says you should do, you know, you should act as you want other people to act, like you should be the sort of friend that you want other people to be towards you. And this is what Soxies is doing sometimes can be seen as very simple, right, and very practical. Here it’s incredibly, it’s like a young guy.
50:49
that’s just trying to figure out how to interact with other people. And Socrates has given them a really simple, but very powerful and quite challenging solution that addresses contradictions in his thinking at a really concrete, practical level. Right. You need to start developing some of these qualities. You can tell me what they all are. You rattled off a list easy as that, but you’re not actually doing any of it. Right. Cause you’ve never thought what’s missing.
51:18
is you never thought of applying it to yourself. Yeah. I want to be respectful of your time and I want to ask you about Plato’s Academy. But the last question I’d love to ask is if people understand Socrates’ life and the demise of him, he was arrested, he was enslaved, and then he had opportunities to escape, yet he chose to stay there and accept his fate, so to speak. Can you expand? He was a president, yeah. Yeah, expand on that for us.
51:47
Well, his friends offered to kind of spring him from prison, and Socrates thought that that would be hypocritical of him, because he chose to spend his life in Athens and accepted what the laws were. So part of his reasoning is that he thought it would then be hypocritical for him to defy the law. But also, we’re given several versions of this, and one is that he was an elderly guy, and he recently lost his…
52:17
best friend, Chirithon, who was about the same age as him. And Socrates, Xenophon implies that Socrates thought he didn’t have that many more years. He was like 70 something, right? In ancient Greece. So like, they didn’t have old folks homes. You know, when people became a burden to their families, they would often, you know, just starve themselves to death or something like that, right? I mean, they didn’t have wheelchairs and they didn’t have like, you know, accessibility ramps and things like that.
52:45
So when you got elderly and your eyesight went and you became senile and stuff like that, your family just had to really look after you and it was difficult to get by. So Xenophon is like, Socrates seems to feel that maybe he’s not gonna be able to do philosophy for that much longer. Maybe he’s beginning to feel that he’s losing his memory and his focus and stuff like that. And his best days are behind him. So he’s not scared of dying.
53:16
Like he talks a lot about how he thinks it’s irrational to fear death. And he really kind of elaborates on that concept. He thinks it would be ridiculous of him to flee into exile. He doesn’t think he’d be welcomed in other cities anyway, and he’s pretty elderly. So this is some of the possible, you know, lines of reasoning that were going on. It sounds like there were probably multiple reasons.
53:45
why Socrates chose to make his stand in court. But I mean, again, a Greek legal defense is called an apology, but Socrates was very unapologetic in court. He continues doing philosophy in court. He angled the jury because he wouldn’t beg for mercy, which was kind of what was expected. He didn’t try to.
54:14
play on their emotions. He just defended his philosophy and stood by his principles. And that kind of offended them. They were used to people bringing their family in and them breaking down in tears in front of Socrates. He never even brought his family into the court. He had a baby at the time, like our toddler. The only reason we know that is we’re told his wife was carrying his smallest son, which suggests he was like…
54:43
pretty small kid, you know, maybe a baby or a toddler. So Socrates didn’t bring his family in. Like, so that would have told the jury right from the outset that something’s, there’s something wrong here. Like, this guy doesn’t intend, like, to beg for mercy and make us feel sorry for him. And he almost gives them a scolding. Right? But, you know, you might, some people at the time thought that what Socrates was doing was ridiculous.
55:12
the, you know, in the ancient world, even, you know, for generations afterwards, people are kind of divided about how Socrates handled himself in court. But it’s one of the most seismic events in European history. You know, I don’t know that philosophy would exist in the same way if it wasn’t for the way that Socrates defended philosophy in court. The most famous and influential of Plato’s dialogues, hands down, is the Apology.
55:41
it was hugely influential in the ancient world. And I think everyone should read it today, whether they agree with Socrates or not. I’ll say one other thing. The other reason that Socrates perhaps isn’t better known is that there’s something odd about the experience of reading the dialogues and reading the Apology that I read Plato when I was about 17, for some weird reason, I guess. I think he was just a weird kid.
56:10
So I started reading Plato and I thought, I can’t get on with this. I think I started reading the Republic and gave up Parkway through like we were talking about earlier. But decades and decades later, I still remember some of the stuff that he said. It kind of stuck in my brain. There’s a dialogue where Socrates is talking to one of his students and he says,
56:36
The experience of speaking to a wise man is like being bitten by a small insect against like a mosquito. And he says, you don’t even notice it happening at the time. But then maybe hours later or the next day, it starts to kind of itch, like, and bother you. And he means that sometimes when you’re reading these dialogues, or if you were engaging for real with Socrates, you might think, what is this guy on about? Like, I’m not convinced by this argument. I’m not sure that he’s doing the right thing here in court. Like, I’m not.
57:05
100% sure about his reasoning, but days, weeks, months, years, decades later, you’re still thinking about the stuff that he said, right? It kind of gets under your skin in a way that’s difficult to explain sometimes. So I think everybody in ancient world felt that what Socrates did in his trial or what he’s portrayed as doing by Plato and Xenophon. And also we have to remember in the ancient world, there were many Socratic dialogues.
57:33
or other anecdotes that we don’t have today. So Marcus Aurelius even mentions, Marcus Aurelius is writing nearly 550 or more years after Socrates has died. So this is like ancient history to Marcus Aurelius. But Marcus Aurelius mentions anecdotes about Socrates that we don’t know about. Like so he probably read other dialogues or
58:02
satires or other texts about Socrates that just don’t exist anymore. Right? So that’s his influence, the influence of Socrates in the ancient world was even bigger than we can sort of imagine today in that regard. They’d read stuff 500 years later that we don’t even, same with Epictetus. Epictetus seems like he’s read stuff about Socrates that we’ve got no idea about today. Like they refer to anecdotes, stories that we don’t know anything else about. But they…
58:31
In the ancient world, people had this feeling that something about Socrates just gets under your skin. He says things that maybe seem unconvincing, but keep kind of gnawing away at you regardless. I mentioned perhaps one of the things that Socrates thought was the most important, and maybe this is a good kind of point to end on. So I don’t expect anyone to agree with it, right? I’ll preface it.
58:59
It’s the last, to show how important it is, it’s the last thing that Epictetus says in the Enchiridion. It’s a quote from Socrates, and actually it’s a quote from Socrates that doesn’t exist in Plato’s Apology or anywhere else. It’s not clear if it’s a paraphrase or he’s quoting some other version of what Socrates said, but Epictetus just writes at the end of the Enchiridion, Anatus and Meletus, who are the two guys that prosecuted Socrates,
59:29
can kill me, but they cannot harm me. Right? Because he means that they can’t damage my moral character. They could kill me, they could take away all of my property, they can destroy my reputation, he could have said, but they can’t actually implicate me in their crime. They can’t destroy my moral character. And this is one of Socrates’ famous paradoxes. He said, injustice harms the perpetrator more than it harms the victim.
59:58
And he goes on and on about that. So many people today would say, it’s hard to swallow, right? Like, you know, maybe there’s some kind of philosophical truth there, but it’s pretty radical. And Socrates is really persistent about it, particularly in the Gorgias. He says, you know, even if you tortured me and did terrible things to me, it harms you more than it actually, you’re just harming my body, but it doesn’t fundamentally harm me because it doesn’t harm my moral character. Like, it harms your moral character.
01:00:27
even though you’re the one that you think, you know, if you’re a great tyrant or a despot or a dictator, you might feel that you’re very powerful. But by doing stuff like that, you’re actually, you know, destroy, you’re weaker than other people and inferior to them because you’re really corrupting and destroying your own character. He says in the core, you guys are harming yourself by unjustly executing me more than you’re harming me by having me drink hemlock. Like
01:00:55
Which, you know, is the sort of thing that he says, and you’re like, I’m not sure if I could go along with you there. But 10 years later, you’re still thinking, remember that weird thing that Socrates said? Like, that is pretty… Socrates goes all the way, at least. He’s very radical in his thinking. Well, and that’s it. I mean, he truly gets his teeth into us with that. And I was kind of planning what you were saying, because there’s part of me that says, oh, this is intellectual cowardice on his part.
01:01:24
He just gave up. But then when you look at like all the Socratic method, there’s other levels, there’s other dimensions. And when you see that, that may be a part of it, but also understanding that because he didn’t have another choice, this was his opportunity to take a stand, to die as he lived. And that is a much, as we see, we probably wouldn’t be talking about him today, had that not happened because it wouldn’t have led to the chain of events that created the things that we are using today to make us better, hopefully.
01:01:54
He in the apology, he inspired generations of other people to become philosophers, you know, and they talked actually again, let’s mention one other thing. Epictetus, the most famous quote from all the stoic literature, I would say is people are not upset by events, but by their opinions about them. And the reason for that is that quote was used
01:02:21
by Albert Ellis, one of the pioneers of cognitive behavioral therapy. And he taught it to all of his clients and all of his students mentioned it in almost all of his books. And it became a cliche in CBT. So it’s really like well known today. But no one ever goes on and says what Epictetus says in the following sentence. Right. So he goes on and says, for example. So he gives an example. And he says, for example, death.
01:02:51
is not inherently a terrible thing because if it were, Socrates would have been terrified of it and he wasn’t. Right? And that’s his example. And I think it’s very telling for a number of reasons. One is this idea that it’s not events that upset us, but rather our opinions didn’t originate with Stoicism. It’s in the Socratic dialogues. I think they know that they’re deriving it from Socrates. And I think that’s why I picked it to mention Socrates.
01:03:20
But the example that he gives, he’s like, what’s the biggest, you know, most dramatic example I can give? He talks about the apology. Like in Socrates’ trial, he’s just, that’s what he’s talking about. He says Socrates wasn’t afraid of dying in court. Like, you know, he said, I’m not frightened of the death sentence. You know, and that demonstrates that there is a way of viewing death, like that isn’t terrifying.
01:03:48
It depends on your attitudes and your values. Like there are people throughout history, you know, that haven’t seen death as terrifying. Socrates is the most obvious example of that. Like, so that’s his big inspiration, like for using that slogan, which is now essentially the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy. Yes. Donald, I could talk to you forever and…
01:04:15
I know that I will have other conversations with you in the future. Yeah. How to think like Socrates, uh, if you’ve enjoyed anything we’ve said, go grab that book, you have the audible version coming out as well. I recorded it and narrated it myself. So I had to practice 254 Greek words. I was going to say you’re much better than I am. I was going to try to quote one of these people. I was like, no, I’m going to say it wrong. So, but you’ve got an incredible body of work.
01:04:42
Where can we go to find out about you? Where can we go to find, and tell us about Plato’s Academy and how the progress is on that, because I know it’s sometimes an hard-to-wish, laborious process. Well, then you can find out more about my stuff on donaldrobertson.name is my website. Plato’sacademy.org is the website for the Plato’s Academy Center. That’s a nonprofit that we have and that we set up a couple of years ago. We run online conferences. We have a newsletter with excerpts from
01:05:12
books by philosophers and classicists. And, you know, our goal was to create a conference center adjacent to the ruins of Plato’s Academy in Greece, so people could come and do philosophy, we could have events there. What we’re doing is a kind of stepping stone to that now is trying to acquire a property that we can turn into a cafe, so we could have small events and workshops as a kind of interim goal. So we’re in the process of doing that. It’s difficult in Greece, like legal
01:05:41
things in Greece and kind of financial things are more complex and they take a bit longer. But we’ve got a lot of support for what we’re doing from institutions in Greece and influential people in the country and around the world. You know, we’ve got a lot of people following our newsletter. So if anybody’s interested in supporting the project, they can find it at Plato’s Academy dot org.
01:06:10
everyone picking this book up as well as all the rest of your great material. And I’ll talk to you soon. Yep. Been a pleasure. Thank you very much, Marcus. Pleasure as well. Thank you, my friend. Cheers. Thank you for listening to this episode of Acta Non Verba.
