How Socrates Became Socrates

Laurence Lampert is professor emeritus of philosophy from Indiana University--Purdue University Indianapolis. He has published several books including Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, How Philosophy Became Socratic: A Study of Plato's "Protagoras," "Charmides," and "Republic, "The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss, and What a Philosopher Is: Becoming Nietzsche, all with the University of Chicago Press.

Introduction

Chapter 1. Phaedo: The First Stage of Socrates’ Philosophic Education
Prologue: Heroic Socrates as the New Ideal 1. First Words
2. A New Theseus to Slay the Real Minotaur
3. A New Herakles to Cut Off and Bury the Immortal Head of Hydra
4. A New Odysseus to Teach the Safe Way to Understand Cause
5. Odyssean Socrates’ Report on His Second Sailing in the Phaedo Measured by the Parmenides
6. Odyssean Socrates Ends His Life of Argument
7. Socrates’ Last Words: Gratitude for a Healing
Chapter 2. Parmenides: The Second Stage of Socrates’ Philosophic Education
Prologue: A Socrates for the Philosophically Driven 1. First Words
2. At Pythodorus’s House during the Great Panathenaia
3. Socrates and Zeno: How to Read a Philosophic Writing
4. Socrates’ Solution to What Parmenides and Zeno Made to Seem beyond Us
5. Parmenides the Guide
6. What Is This Gymnastic?
7. Guiding Socrates
8. Last Words
9. The Socratic Turn
Chapter 3. The Symposium: The Final Stage of Socrates’ Philosophic Education
Prologue: Socrates’ Ontological Psychology 1. First Words
2. Socrates Beautifies Himself for Agathon
3. Diotima’s Myth Guides Socrates to the Third Stage of His Philosophic Education
4. Diotima’s Logos Guides Socrates to the Third Stage of His Philosophic Education
5. Diotima Teaches Socrates What to Teach
6. Alcibiades Arrives
7. Last WordsNote on the Dramatic Date of the Frame of the Symposium
Conclusion: Plato in a Nietzschean History of Philosophy Works Cited
Index