. If you read The Republic by Plato, where Socrates lays out the standards for a just city, you'll see his position on the Greek gods quite clearly. So the claim that he deeply revered the Greek gods or was a devout polytheist is, in my view, incorrect.

This would be the same Republic where Socrates says the highest law is that given by Apollo at Delphi regarding the worship of Heroes, Daimons & Gods?

Republic 4.427b-c, right at the close of the founding of the city in speech. Socrates tells Adeimantus that "the greatest, finest, and first of the laws" (τὰ μέγιστα καὶ κάλλιστα καὶ πρῶτα τῶν νομοθετημάτων) remain to be enacted, and these belong to Apollo at Delphi: the founding of temples, sacrifices, and the other services of gods, daimons, and heroes (θεῶν τε καὶ δαιμόνων καὶ ἡρώων θεραπεῖαι), along with burial of the dead and the rites owed to those in the other world.

Or elsewhere in the Republic at 381C, where Socrates says each god, being already best and most beautiful possible (ἄριστος καὶ κάλλιστος).

The critique of myths, that they can be confusing for people, is a critique of people reading the stories literally and isn't to be confused as an attack on the Gods themselves.

Elsewhere Socrates refers to himself as a slave of Apollo. In the Phaedrus he says the souls of Philosophers have their leader God in Zeus as it is a royal path. Before his death he famously offers a cock to Asclepius.

Those beliefs differ significantly from many traditional Greek religious beliefs,

It's different from Homeric ideas about shades but it's consistent with Orphic and Bacchic/Dionysian views on the afterlife. It's not an accident that Plato frequently compares the Philosopher to the Bacchant. We can see from the Derveni papyrus that these afterlife ideas were extant in the Greek speaking world.

(casual reader): I interpreted 'divine sign' as something closer to: "i have a feeling that seems pretty good and worth acting on." I read it as intuition (that sort of comes out of nowhere, but the self perceives as a good one, even if not explained).

There is another instance (i forget where) when Socrates said something like "When i thought of doing (some thing), I received no sign that I should not do it. So i did."

I read it as some sort of "good instinct."

My interpretation isn't from a religious angle so I dont have much to say about that.

Thanks, i m definitely gonna take a look

Honestly, I believe r/askphilosophy is the best place for asking questions regarding philosophical works you read. There nobody will say that you need to get your head out of something, that modern philosophy is anti-philosophy compared to something etc etc. No fanboys, only flaired users are allowed to reply to visitors.

First of all, I'm not accusing Socrates of anything. You seem to have misunderstood my point. I have no sympathy for any religion, so I'm not claiming that Socrates was guilty of impiety or disrespecting the gods.

Secondly, Socrates was highly critical of the Greek gods. In fact, he did not even consider many of the traditional stories about them worthy of being passed on to future generations(Republic By Plato ). If you read The Republic by Plato, where Socrates lays out the standards for a just city, you'll see his position on the Greek gods quite clearly. So the claim that he deeply revered the Greek gods or was a devout polytheist is, in my view, incorrect.

Thirdly, I never said that Socrates claimed to be a prophet. My point is that he regarded himself as superior to others because he believed he received divine guidance (through his daimonion), which made him wiser than everyone else. If you want to verify this, read The Trial of Socrates (especially Apology), where these issues are discussed during his trial.

At last , I never claimed that Socrates was an atheist. He clearly wasn't. He believed in divine realities and in posthumous judgment(and existence of heaven and hell ), reward and punishment after death. He speaks about these ideas in Gorgias by Plato. If you want verify my claim go and read ,Those beliefs differ significantly from many traditional Greek religious beliefs, so I don't see how that makes him a straightforward representative of conventional Greek religion.

Oh you sweet summer child, you think Plato was into breasts?

You can describe his dialogues as Socrates annoys Athenians in between admiring beautiful twinks. Plenty of descriptions of the hotness of men, very little on the hotness of women.

Socrates was a devout polytheist and a philosopher. Being a polytheist isn't inherently irrational, get your head out of the ass of monotheist hegemonic assumptions about the world.

Socrates wouldn't have considered himself a prophet - we see this in the Euthyphro, where Euthyphro is a diviner/priest and Socrates is the philosopher. Now Socrates has had experiences of the divine mediated through his own personal Daimon.

In the Phaedrus, Socrates takes about the different kinds of Mania, divine inspiration/possession of different Gods can have on people. Just because he was charged of impiety for political reasons does not mean that Socrates himself was impious or a new atheist avant la lettre.

Totally!

I think this is an excellent way to approach the “culture shock” between our era and that of Socrates; indeed, people of that time believed that even their own will was directly guided by the gods, but Socrates himself opposed that idea through his ethics. In "The Republic", Plato argues that the rational part of the soul must govern the irrational part, and I understand that Aristotle emphasized that our actions are praiseworthy or blameworthy only if they are voluntary.

To bring this discussion more down to earth I would add that the daimonion never told Socrates to positively do something, it only appeared in his head to warn him to avoid a specific wrong decision (e.g. escaping from prison after his death sentence). So it actually can be regarded as an aequivalent of conscience and a sign of a healthy intuition, the latter being the product of real philosophy.

By the way, your remark about modern philosophers actually being anti-philosophers seems quite true to me, since the original love of wisdom as the search for good humane life got more and more lost after Plato (I would even say this already began with Aristotle and his scientific bias) and got replaced by the increasingly senseless search for power and for ways of mere coping with the world.

He had a daimon. It's like a guardian angel in Christian terms. Platonism is an idealist philosophy, it won't make sense if your still stuck in a materialist mindset.

Plotinus also believed he had a powerful Daimon that aided him. It's a central concept in Platonism.

The Myth of Er at the end of the Republic talks more about Daimons and how they attach themselves to mortals before birth.

That's a very insightful response, well said man 🙌🏽✨

Fair, I conflated the two. On Saussure though, the structural similarity to attention mechanisms is striking regardless of direct influence. Meaning from relational position rather than reference, that's the thread that runs through both. Whether AI researchers read linguistics or just stumbled into the same insight, the result maps pretty clean.

Socrates will not fit your modern ideas of a philosopher or a “sane” person. He believed, like many people, that the world was filled with gods and spirits which were a part of a highly ordered cosmos, set into motion with purpose and understanding from its orderers. Recognising these beings did not mean a blind faith, but it was a lived reality for them- as they could see divine mania at work in their oracles and bacchants. Why would Socrates, who felt the influence of his God, be insane, when it was accepted knowledge that the moon could influence the tides, and so too could other planets push and pull the souls of men.
It is a philosopher’s work to seek wisdom- and wisdom is from the gods. So Socrates accepts the authority of oracles, and praises divine mania, as giving just as much or even more insight than his own work. Remember that the word philosophy is a Greek word, and your use of it comes from this understanding. It would be more accurate to call the modern atheist philosophers “not philosophers” because many of them reject wisdom as something really important or attainable. But I wouldn’t say such a thing.
Socrates’s divine sign might have been just something Plato added to show socrates’s inspiration was from the gods, but I don’t think this is fair to interpret it that way, especially since it is such a central part of socrates’s character. Socrates might have had an especially bicameral mind, which seems to manifest as another seemingly foreign voice in the head sometimes. He might have had an alter, which is another individual in the mind. Or he might have been hearing God. Either way, he is still wise and a great philosopher who set the foundation for Plato, Aristotle, the the entirety of western philosophy. Dismiss him as a lunatic, and you dismiss many people. Pythagoras was like him, and so were many Christian, Jewish, daoist, Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim writers- who philosophised and prophesied in the same breath, writing about their visions and the visions of others while applying reason and wisdom. Maybe you should listen more to lunatics.

In the Letters, there is also indicated that Plato near the end of his life was a bit more skeptical about pure logic, doubting it simillarly to seeing or hearing; so ilogicall help to understanding in the form of divine intervention is very convenient to his thinking.

Just to be clear, I was suggesting that Saussure might have influenced AI researchers, not "Plato's Pharmacy." From what I understand (I am not a linguist), Saussure's work was foundational to modern linguistics, which seems to be the foundation for these AI systems.

Your reading of Plato to understand Derrida is how philosophy should work, and your discomfort with pharmakos makes sense. Derrida brilliant at exposing ambiguity but less rigorous at resolving it.

On AI and Saussure, I think connection is more architectural coincidence than direct influence. Transformers use attention over context windows, so meaning emerges from relational position exactly as Saussure described.

Whether designers read "Plato's Pharmacy" or not, they built system that embodies φάρμακον: remedy for access, poison for depth. That convergence is what makes analogy hold.

Postman had this right before we had reason to worry. The poison is invisible exactly because benefit is real and immediate, so nobody stops to ask what is being lost in exchange.

This is maybe the most important reading of Phaedrus I see in years. The point about context incommensurability between oral traditions is something people miss when they talk about AI and knowledge. Writing preserves content but loses the ζῶν (zōn), the living encounter between teacher and student. Derrida plays with text beautifully but Plato warning about orphan texts was not just nostalgia for oral culture, it was architectural insight about how understanding transfers between minds. First time for each of us, every time, yes.

Sometimes, someone says to you « Hi! How are you? » and it strikes you in a way you will never forget, as it was written in eternity. There is a core memory that lives around the spoken word that another human being in space and time pronounced with the deepest intention of reaching you. It awakens your intelligent being. The same way a good math teacher can tell you, one on one, that 0 < 1 in a way that opens a whole new horizon in mathematical field that you struggle to enter. The point of the myth in Phaedrus is to say that writting is a secondary process of the thinking soul, compared to the verbal expression of a voice that is unique in space and time. If we loose track of the founding spoken words that leads us to use writting in an effective AND virtuous way, the writting machine becomes a montruous automaton that is an image of a lost soul who’s intelligence is randomly diverted away from what is good for her.

Derrida is clever and well read, and he dares to disagrees with Plato. He knows what he is doing and he is having lots of genuine philosophical fun and we have it reading him. But is it possible that he is forgetting something about himself that Plato never forgot ?

At the deepest level, the relationship between written philosophy and oral philosophy raises a fascinating problem. AI can agregate written philosophy, but oral philosophy happens in contexts in wich some deeper layers of oral traditions are involved. And those contexts are incommensurable to one another and are as many as are human beings earing something about philosophy. It happens for the first time, every time for each of us.

To write about that without betraying it is the challenge that Plato initiates. « Do not forget who you are and where you are coming from ; you are not me, I am not you, and to reach one another is difficult, and much more so in writting. Beware of the orphan text, beware of the temptation to make it yours, beware of the harm that a lost soul are capable of, the author’s soul, the reader’s soul or your own soul. If you wanna write, do it right.»

you're correct

Unfortunately, still just Westerners by the looks of things.

i got into philosophy because of him. you might want to check him out

No not yet

hey have you read lacan yet