POLI 4932 Honors Seminar

This course is restricted to Political Science Honors Program seniors first and any remaining seats are open to Political Science Honors Program juniors. This course is by permission only. Honors Seminar: Socrates as a Teacher: How the most enlightened people of Antiquity, the Athenians, were persuaded to kill Socrates, a poor man who merely spent much of his time in the streets talking to people? Why did Plato and Xenophon make him the center of so much of their literary efforts? And how could Nietzsche, more than two thousand years later, describe Socrates as " the one turning point and vortex of so-called world history"? In this course, we will try to understand this seemingly familiar but truly mysterious figure by focusing on him as a teacher of the young. We will do so with the help of his ancient and modern admirers and critics: Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, and Nietzsche.