Xenophon’s Socratic Education: Reason, Religion, and the Limits of Politics
By Dustin Sebell
JMC fellow Dustin Sebell has recently written a book, Xenophon’s Socratic Education: Reason, Religion, and the Limits of Politics. The book is due for release in March 2021.
It is well known that Socrates was executed by the city of Athens for not believing in the gods and for corrupting the youth. Despite this, it is not widely known what he really thought, or taught the youth to think, about philosophy, the gods, and political affairs. Of the few authors we rely on for firsthand knowledge of Socrates–Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle–only Xenophon, the least read of the four, lays out the whole Socratic education in systematic order.
In Xenophon’s Socratic Education, through a careful reading of Book IV of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, Dustin Sebell shows how Socrates ascended, with his students in tow, from opinions about morality or politics and religion to knowledge of such things. Besides revealing what it was that Socrates really thought–about everything from self-knowledge to happiness, natural theology to natural law, and rhetoric to dialectic–Sebell demonstrates how Socrates taught promising youths, like Xenophon or Plato, only indirectly: by jokingly teaching unpromising youths in their presence. Sebell ultimately shows how Socrates, the founder of moral and political philosophy, sought and found an answer to the all-important question: should we take our bearings in life from human reason, or revealed religion?
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Dustin Sebell is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University, where he studies and teaches the history of political philosophy, and he is also Co-Director of the LeFrak Forum and the Symposium on Science, Reason, and Modern Democracy. Previously, he was Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Government at Harvard University. In addition to Xenophon’s Socratic Education, he is the author of The Socratic Turn: Knowledge of Good and Evil in an Age of Science, which was published in 2016 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and won the Delba Winthrop Award for Excellence in Political Science. Additionally, his writing on Aristotle has appeared in the American Journal of Political Science. He received his BA from St. John’s College, and his PhD from Boston College.
Professor Sebell is a JMC fellow.
Learn more about Dustin Sebell >>
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