- Reconstruct and analyze Socrates’s argument against the charge that he corrupted the youth of Athens.
- Reconstruct and analyze Socrates’s argument that we should not fear death.
- Reconstruct and analyze the arguments for and against escape in the Crito.
- Write a Socratic dialogue on a term relevant to the course. (Remember what a Socratic dialogue is! It’s not just a conversation! It’s a progressive clarification of the meaning of a term or a concept, the goal of which is to generate a good intensional definition!) Here are some possibilities; remember you only need one, and it need not be one of these – these are just examples! Virtue, good, right, guilt, innocence, lie, steal, cheat, defraud, responsibility, help, altruism (there are lots of other possibilities).
- Is Socrates’s approach to ethics that of a mystic, a rationalist, or an empiricist? Defend your answer using appropriate textual evidence. Be sure to discuss why the question matters. (Hint: what he says in the Crito shows that he is not an empiricist about ethics, but you’ll have to look for evidence for his views in all four of the dialogues, I think.)
- Many in ancient Athens held that “the beautiful is the true, and the true is the beautiful.” Explain and discuss this claim. Make sure that you explain Socrates’s position on this. Why would anyone believe that the two are connected? How might they be connected? Is it the case that only the truth is persuasive, and that what is persuasive is true? Why does this question matter?
- Socrates held that knowledge is tied to good intensional definitions and rejected extensional definitions as useless, so that, for example, if we have a good intensional definition of a term like “courage” then we can say that we know what courage is. Socrates also believed that we need this kind of knowledge if we want certainty about our moral decisions. Is he correct?
Sample Solution
