Пол Джонсон «Socrates: A Man for Our Times»

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Автор Пол Джонсон

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

I - Living Man and Ventriloquist’s Doll

II - The Ugly Joker with the Gift for Happiness

III - Socrates and the Climax of Athenian Optimism

IV - Socrates the Philosophical Genius

V - Socrates and Justice

VI - The Demoralization of Athens and the Death of Socrates

VII - Socrates and Philosophy Personified

FURTHER READING

INDEX

ALSO BY PAUL JOHNSON

Jesus

Churchill

Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties

A History of the Jews

The Birth of the Modern World: World Society 1815–1830

Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky

A History of the American People

Art: A New History

George Washington: The Founding Father

Creators: From Chaucer and Dürer to Picasso and Disney

Napoleon: A Penguin Life

Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar

to Churchill and de Gaulle

PAUL JOHNSON

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Johnson, Paul.

Socrates : a man for our times / Paul Johnson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN : 978-1-101-54519-5

1. Socrates. I.

Title.

B317. J65 2011

183’. 2—dc23 2011019767

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

To S. B. , guide, philosopher, and friend

Living Man and Ventriloquist’s Doll

There is always a spirit of the times. Even in deep antiquity, strong and almost identical impulses drove forward the elites in societies separated by unbridged chasms of space. We cannot perhaps explain these coordinations. But we can profitably study them. Two and a half millennia ago, in the fifth century B. C. , in three advanced areas, where literacy existed but was still in its infancy, three outstanding individuals echoed one another in insisting that the distinction between their civilizations and the surrounding barbarism must be reinforced by systematic moral education.