Hello again and welcome back to happy hour. Today we're introducing a new cohost, TJ. Hi TJ.

Hi, good to be here.

TJ is also one of my good friends, and he has a background in philosophy. You actually got a master's degree in philosophy, right?

Yeah, I've got a master's degree for philosophy and just a general interest as well, I think more than anything. I’m one of those people say you've been bitten by the philosophy bug that means you just can't rid of it and you're constantly reading. So I say philosophy is a big part of my life.

I always have a lot of admiration for people who study or who's interested in philosophy because philosophy to me, it's so profound. To me, it sounds a tiny bit boring if you don't mind me saying.

Not at all. I don't think it's as boring as people think it is, but maybe that's because I like it. But for me, it's very simple. I like it，I find it interesting. So I do it as a simple equation. And I do think it's important, so a famous philosopher once said the unexamined life is not worth living, and most philosophers agree.

Yeah, I've actually heard of that quote before. TJ you're going to introduce to us the fun of philosophy, which I think philosophy even though I find it a bit tough going, but it is the basis of civilizations essentially. It shapes people's way of perception of thinking about things, would you say that?

Definitely. Philosophy is those foundational ideas about what is real or not real, what is right, what is wrong, what is beautiful, what is not beautiful. And those are the very core ideas for anybody really. They direct your actions every day.

I'm quite curious. So if you're talking about Europeans or let's talk about English speakers, is there one philosopher that everyone has at least heard about?

I think the key philosopher for the whole western world really is Socrates. He's the father of western thought. And he's the person that when you go to university and you study philosophy, your first day, first class is Socrates. That's where it all begins, and he's the real core.

You just said that Socrates is seen as the father of western philosophy, which reminds me that usually when we think about Chinese philosophy, we think of Confucius. We also say that Confucius basically shaped the way that Chinese culture is, help the way that Chinese people think. Would you say there are some similarities between Confucius and Socrates?

I mean yes, there are similarities; there are also differences, too. Of course they're not exactly the same person, but we're talking around the same time. So Socrates is born, if you take the most popular dates for their birth and death, then Socrates is born about nine years after Confucius dies, so very similar times. And they're both very interested in what is the good life. How can we be good people? So ethics is what we call that question in English. We call that ethical thought. And they're also both set the tone for the future of philosophy, Confucius in the east and Socrates in the west, still the methods that we use and a lot of the foundational assumptions, the very most basic thoughts we have come from Socrates.

I have a question. Since Socrates is so well known in the west, do school children, do they have to learn at least something about Socrates in like middle school or high school?

I'm not sure what the curriculum is right now, but he's one of those people that's just really hard to avoid, that he's in movies, people make jokes about him. Even popular movies will mention him in the same way that Confucius is completely inside Chinese culture. Socrates is inside western culture.

I remember being in school and we had to memorize all these Confucius said this, Confucius said that. But this is even though I don't really know a lot about philosophy or philosophers, but this is something I think I've read about, like Confucius. Socrates didn't really write anything, or at least there aren't any like famous works by Socrates. It's more what people have written about them. Like Confucius, it's always Confucius said this, is obviously recorded by other people. Is that true with Socrates?

It's just another similarity between the two is that they were more focused on their relationships to other people, their relationship to society. And they were more interested in what they did rather than being an academic in the traditional sense of writing lots of things down. And they saw philosophy as part of life of living rather than abstract concept that you have to write down or argue about.

So they're not doing philosophy or teaching philosophy or studying philosophy, they're actually living philosophy.

Yeah, I think you're completely right.

Which brings us to the actual life of Socrates. You know one thing that makes any of these studies fun is that you get anecdotes or like fun facts. I'm really curious about Socrates life, for example, was he born into a very, let's say high end elite family? Because I would imagine to be a philosopher, you need to be very well read; you need to have a lot of these resources that to help you study.

So Socrates is from not a very poor peasant family, but according to the traditional accounts, his father was a stonemason. So that means he makes things out of stone and his mother was a midwife. So again, what we consider quite a normal family, right?

Midwife is someone who helps delivering babies, right? It sounds like more of a 老百姓 family, right?

A normal people, yeah? His job, he was probably trained as a stonemason. That's the traditional way to do things at that time was to just study what your father did. And you would repeat that. But he became a soldier. He volunteered to be a soldier that defended Athens, the Greek city state that he was from. So a city state is a country that's the size of a city. And those are called hopper lights, those soldiers. And he would go and he would fight. And then when he came back he started to just talk to people. He would wander around Athens and just talk to people. And that's how he started to gain his reputation as a philosopher.

So where does the word philosophy come from? What does it mean? Was it Greek word?

It is a Greek word. So the first part of philosophy is the love of something. So we use this word file in a lot of other words to talk about love as well. And then the second part of philosophy is the love of wisdom. Right? And that's the basis, the love of wisdom. This is what really sets Socrates apart from the other people at the time that we call the sophists. And that word has the same root like sophist is the wise person, socrates had a different word used for him because he really loved wisdom. The sophist, they would just teach people how to use language, how to use logic and how to manipulate people and get what they wanted, be successful in business while Socrates said, no, I don't care about making money. All I care about is just knowing the truth is understanding the world. And that's what's important to me. I'm not interested in the practical, well, knowing the truth is a little bit practical. And this is so much alike to Confucius. So Confucius talks about the LI and the YI right? And he says that the real gentleman, the , the philosopher is that something for the because they should do it, not for the , the profit of it. And Socrates is exactly the same in that respect.

So essentially Socrates by Chinese standard would be something of a then， would you say？

I don't think so. That part of the he has, but Socrates was very ugly. I guess a can be ugly as well. Socrates was ugly, he didn't bathe very often and he was also quite rude. So this is where he's very different to Confucius .

Which brings me to the next question, since there were no photographs and there were no, none of those, all of these he was ugly, he was rude, all of these was according to whom? Who wrote about him?

This is where it gets a little bit more complicated. So we have three traditional sources for Socrates, and some of those people are his friends or his students. Some of those people are not his friends, right? Don't like him very much at all. It's hard to know, right? We don't know him. We can only listen to the gossip.

Essentially. So tell us about these gossips.

The first person is Aristophanes, and he's a playwright and he really did not like Socrates. So he paints Socrates as this just really annoying person that goes around and asks annoying stupid questions. And he's almost like a clown in his plays, he goes around, right? He's just a person that goes around saying controversial things, just to be controversial.

But that sounded obviously biased, doesn't sound objective at all.

Right. So we think that Aristophanes clearly had some extra reason to write this way about Socrates. It' seems like Socrates was associated with some politicians that Aristophanes didn't like. And a lot of Socrates’ ideas he didn't like either. So he essentially was doing this on purpose. He was writing these plays with Socrates as a character to try discredit him. But that's the worst side of Socrates that we’ve seen.

And the second person?

The second person who's kind of in the middle is someone that was Socrates student. And he was called Xenophon. He is military historian. And his account of Socrates is a little bit boring, but also maybe the most objective of all of them because he seemed to like Socrates, but he didn't like him too much and didn't think that he was amazing. And he sees him as this person going around with a genuine interest, asking people, what is love, what is justice? How can we be good people and this kind of questions, but also not that he's incredibly intelligent or incredibly special. He comes across as almost like a counselor that just talks to people about their problems and ask them questions in Xenophon’s account.

So Aristophanes was like really bad mouthing Socrates and Xenophon was more like in the middle, just taking it as it is, writing down, is quite relatively objective.

So in today's episode, we talked to our new co-host TJ about the father of western philosophy, Socrates. So TJ mentioned there are three very distinctive versions of Socrates from three different people. We just talked about Aristophanes and Xenophon, who is number three? If you want to know who he is, stay tuned for our next episode. Thank you TJ.

My pleasure.

We'll see you next time. Bye.

Bye.

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