>>17856256 (OP)
It's pretty obvious Socrates is just a mouthpiece Plato uses to express his own ideas. Medieval scholars took Plato's stories literally because they saw parallels between Socrates and Jesus (probably because Jews plagiarized Plato)
>>17857597
We have been through this several times, the wounds on the guy depicted in the shroud are not compatible witht the ones of a crucifixion, rather than an artistic medieval crucifixion, this means without a single inch of doubt that it is a medieval forgery based on the medieval idea of a crucifixion.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion#Archaeological_evidence
>>17858217 >medieval weave >incompatible with funerary customs at the time and the descriptions given of other shrouds >carbon dating >the church saying it's fake
It's impressive peopke are still pretending this is anything but a forgery
>>17856256 (OP)
Probably existed but the stories about him are proto-mythological. One of those guys who was plugged into myth even while he lived considering the daemon and stories about him marching with armies barefoot and coatless in the cold. If they weren't writing so much and he was from 3-400 years earlier, maybe he'd have become an Orpheus like figure.
>>17856256 (OP)
A Socrates almost certainly existed. The Socrates, the one who allegedly said those things that Plato wrote, probably didn't exist.
Probably Plato was saying politically incorrect things, but saying that his pal Socrates said so. That way he doesn't get hanged.
>>17856256 (OP)
Aristophanes makes fun of him in his play The Clouds during his lifetime. I think that establishes his basic historicity as a philosopher and leading thinker in Athens who was a celebrity in the city.
>>17860470
it's not just some guy in the play called Socrates, he is a philosopher, leads a philosophy school and there is even a jab at the (what we now know as) the Socratic method
It's as close as I would write a play where a character is named Donald who is the President of the United States and he wears a red cap.
>>17856256 (OP)
If Plato was the only source perhaps one could hold to this theory but we have other writers like Xenophon who met him in person without being closely associated to Plato's academy, aswell as Aristophanes who wrote the Clouds while Socrates was still alive and well.
>>17860475
The Clouds is a funny play which mocks Socrates’ obsession with minutiae whether it be in ethics or natural science. He puts wax on a fly’s feet to measure the length of its footsteps. That’s silly because of what we know of the real Socrates, always trying to find the most exact answers in the most mundane of questions and showing that no one knows anything.
>>17861774
Yes and I also realized that even if Plato was our only contemporaneous source that would still be sufficient since his students (Aristotle in particular) talk about him as a real man, so Plato making him up would also imply he maniged to trick all his students which seems unlikely.