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therealesioan's review against another edition
2.0
"I caught a sight of the inwards of his garment, and took the flame....for I felt that I had been overcome by a sort of wild-beast appetite"
Bit of a yikes department considering he's talking about a young boy there, and the ending is far from ambiguous insofar as Socrates intentions with Charmides. It says a lot when queer theorists like Foucault or Butler would point to the ancient world as an example of flourishing homosexuality. It's blatantly pedophilia.
That aside the text is one of the weaker early Socratic dialogues. Few and far between are Platonic mystic remarks or deeper metaphysical thinking that comes later. Here Socrates is very much the caricature Nietzsche describes.
He initiates a discussion about the nature of sophrosyne and virtue and ultimately fails to produce any conclusive answer. He merely acts as a sort Derridean deconstructionist raising paradoxes and riddles without anything positive to show for it. Here it's clear Socrates is making life a problem.
He's producing philosophy a negatory tool to problematize tradition and society. He even predicted a couple modern philosophical problems in Hume's is / ought distinction (the passage about universal knowledge being incapable of providing moral truths) and the proto-Heideggerian question of how one can have a science or philosophy of nothing.
Anyway pretty gay overall but still fascinating.
Bit of a yikes department considering he's talking about a young boy there, and the ending is far from ambiguous insofar as Socrates intentions with Charmides. It says a lot when queer theorists like Foucault or Butler would point to the ancient world as an example of flourishing homosexuality. It's blatantly pedophilia.
That aside the text is one of the weaker early Socratic dialogues. Few and far between are Platonic mystic remarks or deeper metaphysical thinking that comes later. Here Socrates is very much the caricature Nietzsche describes.
He initiates a discussion about the nature of sophrosyne and virtue and ultimately fails to produce any conclusive answer. He merely acts as a sort Derridean deconstructionist raising paradoxes and riddles without anything positive to show for it. Here it's clear Socrates is making life a problem.
He's producing philosophy a negatory tool to problematize tradition and society. He even predicted a couple modern philosophical problems in Hume's is / ought distinction (the passage about universal knowledge being incapable of providing moral truths) and the proto-Heideggerian question of how one can have a science or philosophy of nothing.
Anyway pretty gay overall but still fascinating.
sookieskipper's review
2.0
I am not sure which part of this dialogue was one man hitting on other with blatant homosexual innuendos and which part was part of philosophical discussion.
Or if one was metaphor for the other (you will know which is which), I missed it.
Or if one was metaphor for the other (you will know which is which), I missed it.
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