The Socratic turn
Subtitle: knowledge of good and evil in an age of science
By: Dustin Sebell
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 215
ISBN-13: 9780812247800
Copyright date: 2016
Subjects: Philosophers; Early works to 1800; Ancient Science; Ancient Philosophy
Description: The Socratic Turn addresses the question of whether we can acquire genuine knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong. Reputedly, Socrates was the first philosopher to make the attempt. But Socrates was a materialistic natural scientist in his youth, and it was only much later in life--after he had rejected materialistic natural science--that he finally turned, around the age of forty, to the examination of ordinary moral and political opinions, or to moral-political philosophy so understood. Through a consideration of Plato's account of Socrates' intellectual development, and with a view to relevant works of the pre-Socratics, Xenophon, Aristotle, Hesiod, Homer, and Aristophanes, Dustin Sebell reproduces the course of thought that carried Socrates from materialistic natural science to moral-political philosophy. By doing so, he seeks to recover an all but forgotten approach to the question of justice, one still worthy of being called scientific.--Book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-209) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: part I; title: 1. The problem of the young Socrates; title: 2. What is science?; title: 3. The prospects for matter in motion; title: 4. Noetic heterogeneity; title: part II; title: 5. Teleology; title: part III; title: 6. Science and society; title: 7. Dialectic; title: Conclusion.