Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lever Hume Trust.

Today's episode will be an interview with my colleague here at Kings, Rayful Well, Lever is Socrates and I thought that we could probably concentrate on Socrates as he's presented in Plato

since that'll give us plenty to talk about. So I was wondering whether you could start by

sort of describing how Socrates appears in Plato's dialogues.

Sure. He's a complicated figure, but I think the way that he's probably best characterized is the way he

characterizes himself in the apology. He's a he's a gadfly. There's a famous

image in the apology where he compares himself to a gadfly who's coming and sitting on the large but lazy horse of Athens and buzzing and biting and stinging to provoke it into living a better life.

And I think a lot of that imagery can be seen in the way that Plato portrays Socrates in many of the dialogues.

Probably the main but not the only way he's presented is going around buttonholing people asking them if they can tell

him what various virtues are because Socrates, who doesn't Socrates wants to know how to be virtuous and he

thinks that there are various people who might just with a bit of luck be able to

tell him he asks them what virtue is and they are unable to tell

him by and large and the reason they're unable to tell him is that when they attempt to tell Socrates what virtue is, he asks them a whole series

of questions which seek to demonstrate that they don't know what they're talking about.

So Socrates is by and large portrayed by Plato as a very annoying figure

who is constantly showing people up for an ignorance which they didn't think they possessed

or at least don't like having revealed because these are by and large public context

they are often people around. So he's an annoying provocative figure

who really is trying I think pretty much to carry out the mission he describes in the apology.

And I think it's important that he is shown as this annoying figure.

I think maybe this is something we can talk about,

but he's not at all sanitized by Plato. I think most fair-minded readers get the impression that this would be a pretty difficult person to deal with.

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