Socrates: Master and Martyr, Maverick and Mystery

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Notes

1. The Greek word for “happiness,” eudaimonia, suggests a fostering daimon/divinity; the thirteenth article in this collection book examines Socratic eudaimonism, though without actual theology.

2. This term of Socratic art is variously transliterated as elenchos or elenchus. It could also be elenkhos. Different contributors to the book under review use different spellings, which I respect here and below. The word refers to the verbal testing of a statement or of a moral or intellectual stance for its soundness—what, under Socrates’ verbal probing, like a suspect tooth under a dentist’s with her or his little pick, it often lacks. Painfully to the victim!

3. Greek psuchē, “ghost” or (in religious and/or philosophical application, “soul,” to which certainly Socratic term Aristophanes alludes explicitly some years later in his masterpiece The Birds.

4. Aristotle, whose take on tragedy is so influential, has misled many by his effective nullification of the profound religious dimension of the plays and their state-cultic setting, part Carnival, part Passion Week.

5. Aristotle himself, however, took issue with Plato, not with Socrates.