Teaching Socrates to First-year Philosophy Students in Iran, Based on Plato's Euthyphro

Is it possible to teach philosophy to first-year philosophy students in a way similar to the one Socrates used to teach his interlocutors in the early dialogues? Socrates conducted challenging discussions in the agora of Athens; he began with examining everyday routine concepts, subjected his interl...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Maryam Forghani, Sofia A Koutlaki
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Cambridge University Press 2018-10-01
Series:The Journal of Classics Teaching
Online Access:https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S205863101800020X/type/journal_article
Description
Summary:Is it possible to teach philosophy to first-year philosophy students in a way similar to the one Socrates used to teach his interlocutors in the early dialogues? Socrates conducted challenging discussions in the agora of Athens; he began with examining everyday routine concepts, subjected his interlocutors to scrutiny—ἒλεγχος— showed the contradictions in their thinking, and often finally arrived at both his and their ignorance. The starting point of this paper is whether is it possible to teach Socratic philosophy following the Socratic Method. Here, we defend this possibility based on our practical experience of teaching Plato's Euthyphro to first-year students. In particular, the first author taught three groups of first-year philosophy students, for three semesters—Autumn 2016, Spring and Autumn 2017—in the Department of Philosophy at ATU (Allameh Tabataba'i University, Tehran, Iran).
ISSN:2058-6310