Hi all, for those of you who enjoy Greek prose composition, I just thought I’d pass along my Socratic dialogue in Platonic Greek, between Socrates and Stephen Hawking. The judges were kind enough to give it a prize:
The dialogue includes a link at the end to my working document, where I noted alongside each clause the choices I made re. syntax, word order, vocabulary, structure, style, Platonic Greek idiom, etc., as well as aspects of Hawking’s cosmology (definitely not my area: I quickly read through a few of Hawking’s books over the end of year break to get across this area, which was fun) and ancient ethics discussed in the dialogue.
Chad, congratulations! A joy to read, and immensely instructive. It’s going to take me a while to work my way through your commentary, but I fully expect it will be worth it.
Michael
Thanks Michael! There won’t be anything new in there for an expert like yourself; it was mostly for my own reference originally, but I decided to send it along to the judges in case they had questions on any of my constructions. Cheers, Chad
I skipped the English and just read the Greek. It was clear and easy to follow and very good fun. Maybe next time the two can discuss information escaping black holes with Theaetetus.
Congratulations Chad. I will have to find some time to study your entry. I am sure it will be profitable.
I think this quote about your prize winning entry from the Antigone Journal deserves to be shared here.
"The quality of the Greek prose is truly formidable; one of the judges observes that “in 20 years of teaching and examining Greek prose at university level, I have seen no better Platonic composition, nor any so free from error.” This achievement is all the more astounding, given that its composer is a complete autodidact, who has never had any teaching in Greek (or indeed Latin). "
Perhaps those of us who had the benefit of all your well considered posts over the years here on textkit should not be surprised by this. You are an inspiration and model for us all.
Many thanks all! I still feel like a beginner to be honest (still so much to read and learn!), but more comfortable than at the beginning, thanks largely to spending many years on this forum and learning from others. Hope newbies on this site realise that with a lot of personal application and engagement here, the mist will eventually start to clear (it’s still really hard though!). Cheers, Chad
I don’t know how I missed it, but this dialogue is awesome. I am also attempting to read Chad’s book, “How to Challenge Ideas Like Socrates,” in which he analyzes Socratic arguments and attempts to reverse engineer a methodology. I would expect this kind of work from Philosophy departments, except that they choose not to. ἐγὼ σοι χάριν ἔχω , ὀ͂ φίλε!
I have to admit that, in re-reading my manual of Socratic method (I used it myself for the dialogue linked above), it’s rather dry and technical. Sorry about that!
I was trying to be exact, given that the existing scholarship on Socratic arguments is rather full of errors (especially with respect to the Greek - the leading translations are therefore misleading in several cases), and which only became apparent to me when I read every refutation in the Socratic dialogues and tried to work out the patterns for myself.
It turns out all of Socrates’ conversational refutations in the Socratic dialogues can be reduced to 28 argument forms, which are pretty easy to master and then use.
It’s also interesting how the Socratic arguments I worked out then emerge in different contexts in the later Platonic dialogues (which are thought to have more of Plato in them himself, whereas I focused on the Socratic dialogues written earlier in Plato’s career), although that progression hasn’t been properly described yet in the literature, since the arguments have only been described in individual cases or small clusters, rather than comprehensively.
You begin to realise that classics is still a very young discipline, and so much remains to be done.
PS just in case helpful, I wrote a short article for Antigone Journal online explaining my motivation for creating the manual of Socratic method, here: