YMMV / Socrates

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Opinions have differed about the exact value of Socrates' contribution to philosophy. Although a large body of opinion holds that he was a great originator, this isn't a terribly persuasive argument to many philosophers, partly because Socrates' contribution is only recorded secondhand, through Plato, and arguments from tradition are not considered by contemporary philosophers to be very convincing.
  • Additionally, the "Socrates problem," that he produced no writing of his own (and was actually allegedly critical of the discipline of writing in general as detrimental to the development of good memory), and that all we have of his thoughts were put down by others after the fact, has made it hard to fully grasp what are arguments he actually made and what are put into his mouth by Plato after the fact. It's a running joke that every student of Plato comes away thinking that all the parts they agree with were Socrates originals and that everything they don't agree with were added in by Plato. For instance, Plato and Aristotle were both unfriendly to democracies because they never forgot that a democracy killed Socrates, but were Socrates's frequently anti-democratic statements in Plato's dialogues a cause or result of that killing?
  • Friedrich Nietzsche considered Socrates to be not a high point of Athenian culture but the first sign of its decay; he regarded Socrates' technique of picking holes in other people's arguments to be a sign of loss of cultural confidence and claimed that Socrates developed logical reasoning as revenge for being ridiculed for being ugly.
  • In the 20th century, the political journalist I.F. Stone regarded Plato's Socrates as a snobbish, elitist, disingenuous obfuscator who used elementary verbal quibbling to make his own opponents' positions appear to be less coherent than they really were. For example, Plato's Socrates argues that nobody can do their job properly if they can't explain what it is that they're doing, but since most people's explanations of things are illogical and incoherent, anyone who can't give a coherent logical definition of exactly what they do for a living can't really be said to be doing their job properly, and therefore, the only people who do anything properly are philosophers, because giving coherent logical definitions of things is their job. Plato's Socrates also strongly implies and on occasion attempts to demonstrate that every other would-be philosopher in Athens apart from himself was a mere sophist who was incapable of giving a coherent logical definition of anything, the implication being that everybody in Athens except for Socrates is a total doof who doesn't know what he's doing; this argument, if Socrates really made it, goes some way towards explaining the extent to which Socrates was disliked (although his death sentence only barely passed, so he can't have been quite as unpopular as Plato makes him out to have been).
  • There is also the fact that, by modern standards, Socrates' usual discourse during his verbal brawls is full of fallacies, with false analogy being almost omnipresent. Stone is far from the only who has pointed out Socrates can be interpreted as basically a retoric bully who only trumped people with less debating skills or simply less willing to engage in his twists.

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