Notes
1 Parts of this chapter have appeared in Sean Steel,The Pursuit of Wisdom and Happiness in Education:
Historical Sources and Contemplative Practices(Albany: SUNY Press, 2014a).
2 Van Morrison,“In the Garden,”inNo Guru, No Method, No Teacher. Mercury Records, 1986.
3 Joanna Haynes,Children as Philosophers: Learning Through Enquiry and Dialogue in the Primary
Classroom(London: Routledge, 2002), 40.
4 Haynes,Children as Philosophers, 44.
5 Ibid., 129; see Michael Bonnett,“Teaching Thinking, and the Sanctity of Content,”Journal of Philosophy
of Education29/3 (1995): 307.
6 See volume 1 of Diogenes Laertius,Lives of Eminent Philosophers, R.D. Hicks, trans. (Cambridge: Loeb
Classical Library and Harvard University Press, 1925), II.12–14.
7 See Adler’s discussion of“maieutic”or“Socratic questioning”as the“means”of teaching every student in
“the third column”of his vision for education. Mortimer J. Adler,The Paideia Proposal(New York:
MacMillan, 1982); see Haroutunian-Gordon’s use of the Platonic notion of education asperiagogein
Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon,Turning the Soul: Teaching through Conversation in High School(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991).
8 Douglas Carmichael,“I’m Sick of Socrates,”Improving College and University Teaching23/4 (1975):
252.
9 See Anthony G. Rud,“The Use and Abuse of Socrates in Present Day Teaching,”Education Policy
Analysis Archives5/20 (1997): 7; see Carrie-Ann Biondi,“Socratic Teaching: BeyondThe Paper Chase,”
Teaching Philosophy31/2 (June 2008): 119–40.
10 This point is also affirmed by Benson, who remarks that no one is aware of his ignorance after his
discussion with Socrates: Laches, Callicles, Hippias, Euthyphro, Protagoras, and Cephalus. Hugh Benson,
“The Aims of Socratic Elenchos,”inKnowledge, Teaching, and Wisdom, Keith Lehrer, B. Jeannie Lum,
Beverly A. Slichta and Nicholas D. Smith, eds. (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 29.
11 See Rud,“The Use and Abuse of Socrates in Present Day Teaching,”4.
12 Haroutunian-Gordon writes that Socrates“does not follow his stated method because he is in an ill-
structured teaching situation–a situation where one cannot proceed by following predetermined methods
or asking others to do so.”See Sophie Haroutunian-Gordon,“Teaching in an Ill-Structured Situation: The
Case of Socrates,”Educational Theory38/2 (1988): 231.
13 Sebastian Mitchell,“Socratic Dialogue, the Humanities, and the Art of the Question,”Arts and Humanities
in Higher Education5/2 (2006): 181; cf. Leonard Nelson,Socratic Method and Critical Philosophy:
Selected Essays, T.K. Brown, trans. (New York: Dover Press, 1949).
14 Apart from his“method of question-and-answer,”Socrates is thought to employ“synthetic hypothesis,”as
well as“collection and division.”See Carmichael,“I’m Sick of Socrates,”252.
15 See David H. Calhoun,“Which‘Socratic Method’? Models of Education in Plato’s Dialogues,”in
Knowledge, Teaching, and Wisdom,49–70.
16 Michael Hand,“Can Children Be Taught Philosophy?”inPhilosophy in Schools, Michael Hand and Carrie
Winstanley, eds. (London: Continuum, 2008), 5.
17 See any number of myths Plato has Socrates tell in his dialogs; compare these stories with, for instance,
the Promethean myth as told by the sophist Protagoras in Plato’sProtagoras,inThe Collected Dia-
logues, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961),
320c–28d.
18 See the speech in John Dillon and Tania Gengel, trans.The Greek Sophists(London: Penguin Classics,
2003). The similarities between the speeches are remarkable and easy to see; for useful analyses of the
rhetorical devices used in each of the speeches, see Gerald J. Biesecker-Mast,“Forensic Rhetoric and the
Constitution of the Subject: Innocence, Truth, and Wisdom in Gorgias’‘Palamedes’and Plato’s‘Apo-
logy’,”Rhetoric Society Quarterly24.3/4(1994): 148 – 66; James A. Coulter,“The Relation of the Apo-
logy of Socrates to Gorgias’Defense of Palamedes and Plato’s Critique of Gorgianic Rhetoric,”Harvard
Studies in Classical Philology68 (1964): 269–303; Thomas J. Lewis,“Parody and the Argument from
Probability in the‘Apology,’”Philosophy and Literature14/2 (1990): 359–66; also see Thomas J. Lewis,
“Identifying Rhetoric in the Apology: Does Socrates Use the Appeal for Pity?”Interpretation21/2 (1993):
105 – 14; Kenneth Seeskin,“Is the Apology of Socrates a Parody?”Philosophy and Literature6/1– 2
(1982): 94–105.
19 Thomas Chance has written an excellent commentary on Plato’sEuthydemus. His thesis is that“eristic
appears similar to, but is really different from, dialectic”(18). In his view,“eristic is the antithesis to
dialectic, in fact, as the very paradigm of otherness”(19). Although the methods ofelenchosare outwardly
the same, the inward disposition of the sophist that makes use of them is quite different from that of the
“No Guru, No Method, No Teacher” 121