The Last Days of Socrates
I seem to be in a rut with the Plato books, but here is another. The Last Days of Socrates has several dialogs starting with Socrates defending himself against a charge of corrupting the youth of Athens and for being an atheist. He describes how the Oracle of Delphi proclaimed him to be the wisest man, and how he set out to test this by searching for people wiser than himself, since he didn’t feel that he was all that wise. He eventually comes to the conclusion that he is only wiser than other people because he knows that he is unwise, whereas they do not.
After the trial and pronouncement of sentence (death) there are dialogs concerning death, the immortality of the soul and a description of what Socrates thinks the afterlife might be like. The proof of the immortality of the soul was a little difficult for me to understand the first time through and I had to read that section a few times. I won’t try to paraphrase it here, but it relies on the Forms.
The Forms are pretty easy for a computer programmer like me to understand. Essentially a Form is like an abstract superclass. Its a grouping or a classification. A triangle is something that you see but a shape is not. Shape is the Form of things like triangles, circles, squares, etc. In the same way, virtue is the Form of things like bravery, temperance, etc. Also, the Soul is the Form of a person. The Forms are the perfect incarnation of reality. They are the truth, the divine, whereas we live in the imperfect world where our senses deceive us. Seeing the Forms in the world is analogous to gaining wisdom, its the object of the philosopher.
You shouldn’t need me to recommend this. Just think of the countess people over the last 2500 years that copied these books to keep them alive, sometimes at the risk of their lives. If that endorsement doesn’t beat Oprah’s book club, I don’t know what does.
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