Leon de Haas (The Netherlands)

Some of the key features of Socrates' interventions in Plato's early dialogues are at the heart of all philosophical practice. Socrates' philosophy was performative, consisting of meetings somewhere sometime with one or more interlocutors on a topic that at least one of the interlocutors was greatly concerned about. He intervened in questions or statements made by his interlocutors by questioning concept definitions. In this lecture I examine the question to what extent the philosophical practice of the classical Socrates needs change on the basis of contemporary philosophy. We focus on the consequences of the phenomenological and linguistic turns for Socratic practice. In this research we use the idea of 'conceptual persona' of Deleuze & Guattari. In this way we get an impression of a contemporary Socrates. The lecture is illustrated with mind maps and images and is followed by a discussion with the participants in the online conference.