The Return of the 30 Second Socratic Dialogue!
Posted on January 7, 2006 Posted by John Scalzi 9 Comments
One of the things about putting together the Hate Mail book is that I’m going through old versions of the Web site and finding lots of forgotten stuff there. For example, this cartoon, which was part of a philosophy book proposal I put together back in the days when I didn’t have any books published, so no one would buy a book from me. The philosophy book proposal, incidentally, is not entirely ridiculous for me, being that I have a philosophy degree. Ironically, however, the illustrator of this piece, Richard Polt, is actually a professor of philosophy and has written a book on Heidegger.
But enough about that. Here, once again for your viewing pleasure, is the 30-Second Socratic Dialogue!
Oh wow. I want this book for my kids (because we’re crazy homeschooling freaks). Sad wailing that it’s only one panel from a proposal.
Yup! That’s why they had him poisoned shot him, alright! Perhaps extreme assholeness ought not be a capital crime. But as long as you live in a pure democracy, don’t be a dick…
Somebody needs to show this cartoon to Judge Roy Moore of Alabama.
“Oi!!! Did you spill my Pint??!?!!!!”
No really, I’d have loved to have this book back in art school. They tried to teach us Nietzsche; it put me to sleep. This is why I’m an ignorant bum today.
Excuse me now, I feel the Philosopher’s Song coming on…
Not to be a total pain about this, but my screen does not display the cartoon properly, the right hand column overwrites it. Am I missing something or are you? No big deal, I just copied and pasted into Word to read it, but the feedback might be useful to either you or me.
If you’re looking at the site at a resolution less than 1024×768, you’re probably getting clipping of the image.
So what’s your take on this argument, now?
What about the logical fork of, “It’s pious because the gods love it?”
And we’ve neglegted the whole matter of, “It’s pious because the priests tell us that it’s pious.”
Well, then it would be the 45-second Socratic dialogue, wouldn’t it?
That’s the funny thing; modern commentary on the Euthyphro often deals mostly with that dilemma, but Euthyphro in the actual dialogue doesn’t seem to want to explore the other fork that much, if I recall correctly. To me it’s the really terrifying and crazy possibility (what if God changes his mind about what he loves? How do you know he’s not lying about what he loves–since if he loves lying, it would even be OK for him to lie about it? What do you do when he asks you to pull an Abraham?) and therefore inherently more interesting.