Why are Socrates' Monologues presented as dialogues?

Plato was dealing with shitloads of ambiguities in a still primarily oral language, in a time when smart fuckers were abusing these ambiguities to make it seem like contrary propositions were true and shit

A lot of what he's doing, if you read it back into the original Greek, is basically two pages of rambling to pin down what to us would be fairly basic

Try to imagine it as fluid conversation within that cultural context, he's trying to get people to pin down terms and hold fast to them in their minds, and then BUILDING UP a concrete meaning and using that as the cornerstone to PROVE OR DISPROVE something about another term that they defined earlier, etc., things like that - at a time when his entire audience is expecting it to be a confused free-for-all where the speech doesn't "proceed" toward anything linearly, dialectically, or otherwise in an orderly fashion.

Plato is talking to people who are used to being wowed by sophists who manipulate confused heaps of words, terms, homonyms, synonyms, etc. He's taking that horizon of expectation, and showing the people in real time that you can proceed to (semi-)necessary conclusions, bracket off impossibilities without reintroducing them through sleight of hand, and that you can ultimately proceed to higher and surer forms of knowing through careful dialogue.

Aristotle would extend this to term logic, where predicate calculus provides the kind of "obligation" to accept the conclusion if you accept the premises. But Plato is driving at a very similar thing, and term logic wouldn't have been possible without building what he was doing, though it goes quite a bit farther - for better or worse.

No wonder why they hate sophists

Socrates: He who could not write
-Nietszche

...

...

Then you should realize how incorrect your OP is. Plato doesn't start monologuing until later works.

The Greeks had just become conscious about 200 years before Socrates. They didn't really know how to transcribe dialogue.

Read Protagoras

Were the people he had dialogues with even real half the time? A lot of the time it feels like they're strawmen for Socrates to make his point with.

>is basically two pages of rambling to pin down what to us would be fairly basic

As with all philosophy, it's fairly basic and obvious once someone has actually said it first.

>itt: fools and sophists

this

Most (if not all) of them were significant figures in the intellectual history of ancient Greece. Knowing who they were and why they mattered, can help you understand the dialogues better desu. Look 'm up.
The dialogues themself were most likely fictional thought.
Good post.

So sophists were basically Stirner-tier punfuckers?

That doesn't sound too bad.

The use of convoluted language is evident in the Greek itself. Meno speaks in a very straightforward registers, while Socrates has these twisting and difficult passages. Notice that Meno sometimes just doesn't understand what Socrates asks him.

Bartlett's about as good a translation as you'll get of the Meno.

The Platonic dialogues are *all* Platonic inventions, but in accordance with Socratic philosophizing. The big dialogue about this is the Phaedrus, which discusses writing. The dialogues are written pretty much in accordance with the discussion of the perfect writing that has a strict logographic necessity.

This is a high quality post.

SOCRATES: Is it not correct to say, Anonimes, that muh forms blah blah blah gods yada yada?
ANONIMES: Certainly, Socrates. One would have to be mad to claim otherwise. I could not agree with you more. You are the man, Socrates. May I be allowed to place your genital inside my mouth?
SOCRATES: By Zeus, my dear friend, do so!

Look dialogue up in the dictionary. It doesn't mean what you think it means.

Maybe before you wasted everyone's time by making a thread on a Gambian yam cultivation sign post you could have used that time to learn what a dialogue is.

>Gambian yam cultivation
Kek'd, never seen that one before.

Socrates basically fucked everything up for everyone with this shit

before it was just like: "alright everyone develop your own thoughts and do what you want with them"

Now its always: "we have to talk about our ideas together because Socrates said so"

I don't quite see what you mean, reading Bartlett currently and although sometimes you want to slow down the only part that is actually fucked beyond any easy understanding is during the clusterfuck logical circles while defying piety in Euthyphro and thats a famously difficult to translate piece of the dialogue.

The syntax in which Socrates talks can be confusing but its pretty common for Greeks, if you haven't yet you might want to read Homer first. Its a good way to get familiar and comfortable with it all, just be sure to grab a faithful translation like Lattimore's Iliad cause if you end up reading Pope it wont help diddly dick understanding Socrates.

to build on this, Plato's use of dialogue form is also a rhetorical device: it normalizes the process of philosophy by having ordinary, though admirably noble, people engage in philosophical conversations. Phaedrus, for example, is a discussion, refutation, and replacement of a speech that phaedrus had heard earlier on.

he just happens to meet socrates while walking around athens, and it's certainly no accident when socrates mentions something along the lines of: "though I never leave the city, if we're philosophizing, i'm willing to go anywhere with you." the fluidity, poetry, and ease of reading his works is partly from plato's past experience as a poet, but i would say moreso as an extension of his intention to create philosophers.

plato aptly knew that dense treatises that alienated his audience was no way for them to ascend out of the cave and toward the light which is true knowledge. thus, the dialogue form, instead of an aristotelian treatise, was a way to bring people out of the cave.

at my university, the first-year courses barely touch on aristotle; plato gets all the love, for what i think is an extension of this. he's easy to read. fun, even. symposium is a masterpiece of literature and philosophy.

i recommend a volume called "plato as author" which has essays on this sort of thing. also, the cambridge companion to..., the yale lectures online, and any and all secondary material.

most importantly, though, read his works with an open, perceptive mind. goodreads generally suffers from the same prejudice against plato: that he sets up straw-men and has socrates affirmed by compliant yes-men despite having flawed ideas. that's his trick: his readers are actively involved in the process of philosophy by disagreeing.

i'm rambling, but i love plato. cheers dudes.

also, often these dialogues which had interlocutors that were well known in athens were constructed afterwards. some of the post-death-of-socrates dialogues featuring him were constructed in a way that painted him as pious, genuine, basically all the things that would defy the charges that eventually killed him.

speeches from the classical period, moreover, were not directly transcribed. speeches from thucydides, herodotus, plato included, were constructed afterwards, sometimes by people there, or second, third, or fourth-hand.

symposium, for example, is a story of one night and a series of speeches told some 4-5 links away a long time after it actually occurred. these speeches are rhetorical constructions by plato that may have been based in fact. a critical approach is necessary: why would aristophanes say x when he wrote a disparaging play against socrates? why have alcibiades arrive late, drunk, and confessional? these are questions that should be in your head when reading plato.

if everybody developed their own thoughts and thus developed their own personal, subjective truths, society as a whole would collapse. see: cultural relativism. dialogue is a natural process and occurs outside of plato. aristotle wrote treatises, and others wrote counter-treatises. an aristotelian might write a counter-counter-treatise defending some parts of the original thesis, and thus a synthesis might come out. how is this different from a dialogue? the process of talking amongst each other is, and has, been the scholarly norm since plato's time. a free-for-all between individuals with completely independent systems of thought is little more than leaves thrown into the wind.

Dont let this thread die

Aristotle didn't invent the predicate calculus you mong.

you're right, Aristotle didn't invent predicate calculus, he discovered its existence.

>if everybody developed their own thoughts and thus developed their own personal, subjective truths, society as a whole would collapse.

Well religion is still around and society has yet to collapse so I'm afraid I can't believe this just yet
But hey at least its still trying

>Well religion is still around and society has yet to collapse
how does the one follow from the other?

Euthyphro is presented as a dialogue for the most part. You can't really say it's a "monologue" because all of Socrates' speech are replies to Euthyphro's points. Like, what do you expect Euthyphro to say?

naaahhhhh... well... he DISCOVERED logic, but he INVENTED the informal logical languages of the term logic and syllogistic reasoning. That being said, he didn't discover predicate calculus (because nobody can or did DISCOVER it), nor did he invent it, since the credit for that goes to good ole Gottlob Frege.

(To clarify, logic as an abstract system would, in my understanding, be discovered. A particular set of notational or expressive conventions for articulating is however invented (be it a formal or informal linguistic/symbolic system).

can someone explain this to me

Lol religion seems like the opposite of everyone developing their own thoughts

kek'd

religion is pretty much just different subjective truths is it not?

the bible says X happened but the Quran says Y happened and all that shit

its the opposite of a subjective truth
it exists outside of a persons views and claims objectivity
eg. you may think that sex outside of marriage is fine but the bible says otherwise

but isn't the bible itself a subjective truth that people merely choose to treat as an objective truth?

Following that line of thought though, could anything be objective?

I agree with Religions strive to overcome perspective/subjectivity and claim absolute Truth, how the world is in itself.

You seem to been advancing out of the beginner level...but you seem unable to take the final step out of it. Let's see if I can clear up some of that hazy, ill-defined adolescent thinking.

In addition to discovering logic, Aristotle also discovered the "informal logical languages" and syllogistic reasoning. In discovering logic, he also found a means by which people could use it to make arguments and reason with certainty, or at probability.
You've given no reasons or support for why Aristotle invented these things rather than discovered them, you merely assert your opinion as fact.

The beginnings of predicate calculus can be traced back to the work of Aristotle. He is the original scientist and mathematician.

They do that at times, sure, but there are definite counter arguments or relevant points which get presented by the other parties.

Also, you have to keep in mind, much of our modern methods of writing have their roots in Aristotle, a student of Plato who studied Homer and Virgil's works in his youth.

Our standards for writing evolved primarily from Aristotelian and Christian sources.

2400 years is a long time, user. Have some patience for the old man.

this whole thing ties into Kierkegaard quite neatly actually

From an outside perspective it may seem as if religion is about casting off subjectivity
However in actuality the real value of religion is in the way it is capable of amplifying subjectivity
Religion in this valuable form is not about simply following the crowd which gains you nothing
It is about only the individual relationship with god, being judged only by god and thus in the process gaining that all important "subjective truth"

kierkegard sounds like a fag desu
was he a protestant?

>le edgy

Kierkegaard was a genius, and closer to asexual than homosexual, lol.

Nicely put, user.

The Bible is objective within the subjective domain of the reality it presents. Faith in the Bible is entirely subjective, however.

>could anything be objective?

EXACTLY!

All philosophy, science, and mathematics are striving to get outside the subjective domain of our humanity and into the realm of absolute truth. It is the same struggle Plato discusses in his Republic.

The way we attempt to do this is by deriving methods of analysis and confirmation which rely as little as possible on the subjectivity of our human limitations and individual perspectives, but, ultimately, we cannot be certain our findings - especially in the abstractions of philosophy are ever truly objective. This is also why we need other human beings for analysis - it helps to insure a more objective perspective by removing our individual insights from the subjective domains of our own minds and subjecting them to public scrutiny.

The best indicator of objectivity we have is provability/demonstrability.

>calling people fags is edgy

Never been to Reddit, actually. I just don't rely on those adolescent obfuscations.

I was the first user who called out your mistake. Predicate logic makes use of the concept of quantifiers which are defined over a domain of discourse.
Aristotle's syllogisms are not a formal language or even a deductive system within one.
Yes Aristotle was he grandfather of logic, but he no more discovered first order logic than Galileo discovered general relativity.