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An Apology to the Dead: Directed by Tim Gunn, Jon Worful. With Rockey Black, Tonya Chapman, Lisa Sodman Elzinga, Mark A. France. An ethics professor ironically finds himself caught in a dangerous ethical dilemma when he attempts to intervene on behalf of a bright but troubled student who appears to be a victim of physical abuse.
- (25)
- Drama, Thriller
- Tim Gunn, Jon Worful
- 2008
Drama, Thriller. An Apology to the Dead Trailer. An ethics professor ironically finds himself caught in a dangerous ethical dilemma when he attempts to intervene on behalf of a bright but troubled student who appears to be a victim of physical abuse.
- 2 Min.
An Apology to the Dead. Summaries. An ethics professor ironically finds himself caught in a dangerous ethical dilemma when he attempts to intervene on behalf of a bright but troubled student who appears to be a victim of physical abuse.
An Apology to the Dead Film Online - Mit dem Schauspieler Richtung Tim Gunn und Jon Worful führt Rockey Schwarz die Besetzung dieses Films der USA, mit Skript in englischer Sprache, deren Präsentation in der Öffentlichkeit war für 2006 geplant.
- Overview
- The Apologys of Plato and Xenophon
- The public’s hatred of Socrates
- The impression created by Aristophanes
- The human resistance to self-reflection
- Socrates’ contempt for democracy
- Socrates’ radical reconception of piety
- The danger posed by Socrates
- Socrates versus Plato
Apology, early dialogue by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, purporting to represent the speech given by Socrates, Plato’s teacher, at the former’s trial in Athens in 399 bce in response to accusations of impiety and corrupting the young. At the trial, a jury of Socrates’ fellow citizens found him guilty and sentenced him to death by poisoning (...
Soon after Socrates’ death, several members of his circle of admirers undertook to preserve and praise his memory by writing works that represented him in his most characteristic activity—conversation. (Socrates himself wrote nothing.) Many of these “Socratic discourses,” as Aristotle called them, are no longer extant. But those composed by Plato and the historian and philosopher Xenophon survived in their entirety. What is known about Socrates is therefore based primarily on the contents of one or the other—or both, when their portraits coincide—of these sources. Plato and Xenophon also wrote separate accounts of Socrates’ trial, each titled Apology of Socrates.
Britannica Quiz
An Odyssey of Grecian Literature
In none of Plato’s dialogues is Plato himself a conversational partner or even a witness to a conversation. In his Apology, however, Socrates says that Plato is one of several friends in the audience. In this way Plato indicates that he was an eyewitness of the trial and therefore was in the best possible position to write about it. In contrast, Xenophon was not present as a live witness: he tells his readers that he is reporting only a portion of Socrates’ speech and that he learned about the trial from Hermogenes, a member of the Socratic circle.
Although there are significant differences between Plato’s and Xenophon’s accounts of what was said at the trial (for example, Xenophon, but not Plato, dwells on the troubles of old age from which Socrates is escaping by being condemned to death), the two Apologys agree in many details. They agree about what the charges against Socrates were: failing to acknowledge the gods recognized by the city, introducing other new divinities, and corrupting the young. They also agree that Meletus, one of the prosecutors of Socrates, supported his accusation by referring to a divine voice or sign that Socrates claimed as his personal guide; that Socrates acknowledged the guidance of this divine sign in his speech; that part of Socrates’ defense consisted of a cross-examination of Meletus; that Socrates referred to an inquiry made by one of his friends to the oracle at Delphi (his friend asked the oracle whether anyone was wiser than Socrates); that the oracle’s answer (no) confirmed that a unique status had been conferred upon Socrates by the gods; that, having been found guilty, Socrates refused to propose a punishment that the jury would find acceptable; and that, after the jury voted in favour of the death penalty, he once again addressed the jury and expressed no regrets for his manner of living or the course of his trial. There is no reason to suppose that Xenophon had learned of these aspects of the trial from Plato. His agreement with Plato about these matters thus confirms that they are not fabrications.
Nevertheless, it remains possible that some parts of the speech Plato wrote were not actually delivered at the trial or were expressed rather differently. Plato’s speech represents his creative attempt to defend Socrates and his way of life and to condemn those who voted to kill him. In fact, Plato’s motives in writing the Apology are likely to have been complex. One of them, no doubt, was to defend and praise Socrates by making use of many of the points Socrates himself had offered in his speech. But, as any reader of the work can see, Plato is at the same time using the trial and death of Socrates to condemn Athens, to call upon his readers to reject the conventional life that Athens would have preferred Socrates to lead, and to choose instead the life of a Socratic philosopher. In the 4th century bce Athens had no norm of accurate reportage or faithful biography, and so Plato would have felt free to shape his material in whatever way suited his multiple aims. Because it was Socrates he wished to praise, he had no choice but to make the Socrates of the Apology close to the original. But he would not have felt bound merely to reproduce, as best he could, the speech that Socrates delivered.
Part of the fascination of Plato’s Apology consists in the fact that it presents a man who takes extraordinary steps throughout his life to be of the greatest possible value to his community but whose efforts, far from earning him the gratitude and honour he thinks he deserves, lead to his condemnation and death at the hands of the very people he seeks to serve. Socrates is painfully aware that he is a hated figure and that this is what has led to the accusations against him. He has little money and no political savvy or influence, and he has paid little attention to his family and household—all in order to serve the public that now reviles him. What went wrong?
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Socrates goes to some length to answer this question. Much of his defense consists not merely in refuting the charges but in offering a complex explanation of why such false accusations should have been brought against him in the first place. Part of the explanation, he believes, is that he has long been misunderstood by the general public. The pub...
Long before Aristophanes wrote about him, Socrates had acquired a reputation among his fellow citizens because he spent his days attempting to fulfill his divine mission to cross-examine them and to puncture their confident belief that they possessed knowledge of the most important matters. Socrates tells the jurors that, as a result of his inquiri...
Socrates’ analysis of the hatred he has incurred is one part of a larger theme that he dwells on throughout his speech. Athens is a democracy, a city in which the many are the dominant power in politics, and it can therefore be expected to have all the vices of the many. Because most people hate to be tested in argument, they will always take actio...
The two modes of Socrates’ religiosity—serving the god who presides at Delphi (Apollo, though Socrates does not refer to him by that name) by cross-examining one’s fellow citizens and accepting the guidance of a divine voice—are nothing like the conventional forms of piety with which Socrates’ contemporaries were familiar. The Athenians, like all Greeks in the ancient world, expressed their piety by participating in festivals, making sacrifices, visiting shrines, and the like. They assumed that it was the better part of caution to show one’s devotion to the gods in these public and conventional ways because, if the gods were not honoured, they could easily harm or destroy even the best of men and women and their families and cities as well.
In effect, then, Socrates admits that his understanding of piety is radically different from the conventional conception. In keeping with his conception of virtue as a form of knowledge, he uses an intellectual test, not merely a ceremonial test, to determine whether someone is pious. You may participate in the conventional practices of civic religion, but can you say what piety is? If you cannot, do you at least admit your ignorance and search constantly for a better understanding of piety, as the god wishes you to do? More generally, though you may think you are a good person, can you say what your virtues consist of? If you cannot, and if you do not spend your life trying, then your goodness is a sham.
An open-minded and conscientious member of the jury in the trial of Socrates could therefore have come to the conclusion that Socrates posed a significant threat to Athens and should be found guilty of the charges against him. In a way, Socrates did fail to acknowledge the gods recognized by the city, he did introduce new gods, and, by teaching these things to the young who gathered around him, he did corrupt them. He may have referred to “the god” or “the gods,” but his conception of what is involved in attending to the gods was utterly novel and politically dangerous. The fact that Socrates saw his piety as the genuine article, and the unreflective virtue of his fellow citizens as false virtue, indicates that he took the entire religious life of Athens, no less than its political life, to be unworthy of a good man.
If there is any doubt that the unorthodox form of piety Socrates embodies could have brought him into direct conflict with the popular will, one need only think of the portion of Plato’s Apology in which Socrates tells the jurors that he would obey the god who presides at Delphi rather than them. Imagining the possibility that he is acquitted on the condition that he cease philosophizing in the marketplace, he unequivocally rejects the terms of this hypothetical offer, precisely because he believes that his religious duty to call his fellow citizens to the examined life cannot be made secondary to any other consideration. It is characteristic of his entire speech that he brings into the open how contemptuous he is of Athenian civic life and his fellow citizens. He prides himself on the fact that he will say nothing to curry favour with the jurors or to conceal his attitude of superiority to them—even though he realizes that this is likely to lead some of them to vote against him out of resentment. Here, as in so many parts of his speech, Socrates treats his day in court as an opportunity to counter-indict his accusers and his fellow citizens (those, at any rate, who voted against him) for the way they lead their lives. In effect, Socrates uses the occasion of his trial to put his accusers and the jurors on trial. But this was a natural role for him, because he had done the same thing, day after day, to everyone he met.
One can conclude that Plato was not blind to the civic and religious dangers created by Socrates. Part of what makes his Apology so complex and gripping is that it is not a one-sided encomium that conceals the features of the Socratic way of life that lay behind the anxiety and resentment felt by many of his fellow citizens. Plato, of course, leaves no doubt that he sides with Socrates and against Athens, but in doing so he allows one to see why Socrates had enemies as well as friends. The multisidedness of Plato’s portrait adds to its verisimilitude and should increase confidence in him as a source of understanding of the historical Socrates. A defense of Socrates that portrayed him as an innocuous preacher of moral pieties would have left one wondering why he was sentenced to death, and indeed why anyone bothered to indict him in the first place.
Plato gives no hint in his Apology that he had any reservations about the way Socrates led his life or the doctrines that guided him; the format of the Apology prevents him from doing so. He has made the decision to let Socrates speak for himself in this work and to refrain from offering any of his own reflections on the justice or injustice of the charges against his teacher. But, in his later dialogue the Republic, he puts into the mouth of its principal interlocutor, “Socrates,” an observation about the corrosive power that philosophy can have when it takes hold at too early an age. When young people first hear philosophical questions about the traditional moral standards they have learned from their parents and their community, and when they see that it is difficult to defend these orthodoxies without falling into contradiction, they are prone to reject all traditional morality and to become essentially lawless. For this reason, philosophy may come to be seen as a dangerous and disreputable pursuit. The Socrates of the Republic therefore suggests that in an ideal society the young should not be exposed to ethical doubt until they are well into their maturity. This, of course, is not a restriction that the historical Socrates imposed on himself. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates prides himself on addressing his questions to every Athenian—no one, in his view, is too young or too old for the examined life—and he freely acknowledges that the young love to see their elders embarrassed when they are unable to defend their beliefs. Whereas the Socrates of Plato’s Apology assumes that there is no need to place limits on philosophical inquiry, the Socrates of the Republic—who speaks as the mouthpiece of Plato—holds that in an ideal society this kind of activity would be carefully regulated. Similarly, in Plato’s late dialogue Laws, the main speaker, an unnamed visitor from Athens, praises Sparta and Crete for forbidding the young to criticize the laws of their communities. Plato’s great admiration for Socrates was all the more remarkable because it coexisted not only with a recognition of why Socrates was considered dangerous but also with his belief that Socrates was, to some degree, guilty of impiety and of corrupting the young.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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19. Dez. 2023 · Apology to the dead The world’s failures led to the carnage of Oct. 7. Family and friends attend the funeral of Gabriel Barel, who was murdered by Hamas terrorists at the Nova music festival on Oct. 7, in the northern Israeli city of Tzfat, on Oct. 16, 2023.
