Socrates
The following is from Socrates on the Blessing of Being Refuted by Andrew Beer for the on-line journal Antigone.
Socrates says of himself: “[I am one of those people] who would be delighted to be refuted, if I say anything untrue, and who would be delighted to do the refuting, if someone else were to say something untrue.”
“But their delight would be no less,” Socrates continues, “in being refuted than in refuting: for I consider [being refuted] a greater good [than refuting], precisely inasmuch as it is a greater good to be released oneself from the greatest evil than to release another.”
The greatest evil, Socrates next explains, is false opinion (δόξα ψευδής) concerning the subjects of the present conversation: “I believe there is no evil so great for a human being as false opinion about the things we are discussing right now.”
This is what I hoped for when I started this blog. I wanted criticism that I could answer (validating what I wrote) or that show me I was wrong (leaving me wiser than before.). Unfortunately I sometimes responded rudely tp criticism and drove away what might have been my most valuable critics..
Tags: Socrates
Phil Ebersole's Blog 
February 20, 2022 at 6:12 pm |
Sheesh, Phil, MAYBE you’ve inadvertently driven away a potential constructive critic or two in all the years you’ve had your blog.
But in America today, it’s common for people to respond to critics by trying to get them canceled, or fired, or (through some hoax) visited by a SWAT team.
This isn’t YOUR style.
My smattering of Greek tells me that the Greek word for “belief” in that phrase “false belief” is (in our alphabet) “doxa.”
“Orthos” is Greek for “straight.” So “orthodoxy” is the correct, or at any rate the APPROVED belief.
And “heterodoxy” is the OTHER belief, the one that’s NOT necessarily approved.
But Socrates and you, and we readers of your blog, know that often enough, it’s the heterodox belief that turns out to be the true one.
That’s why we keep coming back to your blog.
LikeLike