Sunday, 19 April 2026

Major works meeting

• Continuing Apollonius’ Argonautika
• Starting from line 885 of Book IV
• Ending Book IV around line 1780
• Next week we’ll finish Book IV

Minor works meeting

• Continuing Theaetetus
• Starting from the beginning of 160a
• Ending around 172b

Theaetetus reminder for next week:

Discussion was the rebuttal of Theatetus’ assertion that perception is truth via the arguments of Protagoras being wise, knowing what you don’t know and the impossosiblity therein, and perceiving a foreign lasnguage being different from understanding it. Then Socrates rescues Protagoras by defending the argument. He says that he merely argued something that is inescable: everyone has a private truth. However, he didn’t mean to say that each private truth is equall; some are better than others. Just that better is not because it is more true or less true, but better because of some betterness, i.e. consequences. Then Socrates and Theodorus start to tackle that discussion. We left off in the middle but Socrates argues that truth does have a critical component because in times of crises people want an expert to help them, presumably because there is some underlying reality to what they can do and not merely just a better form of perception that they can convince others of. The argument then went to a contradiction because if each person is entitled to their own reality then truth can have magnitude by how many people believe something. And therefore Protagoras’ own argument essentially allows others to “out vote” him so to speak which is a contradiction because he says that he says is the “Truth” (in his book).