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Notes -
Western philosophy, sure, but I don't see the Socratic school having much influence on Confucius, Mencius, Han Fei, Laozi, Zhuangzi, or any pre-20th century Chinese philosophy. Many of them seem like the sorts who'd object to holding up a guy who trolled Athens so hard he got cancelled from life (as I once heard it put) as an example for sages to imitate.
(I've been slowly working my way through Thomas A. Metzger's * A Cloud Across the Pacific: Essays on the Clash between Chinese and Western Political Theories Today*. I also remember reading a comment on a forum thread about philosophy over a decade ago, from a Chinese individual arguing that Western philosophy went off the rails with Socrates and Plato, and has spent the last two millennia and change building airy edifices of dangerous nonsense.)
Yes, that's certainly correct. I think that's what makes the European (and specifically Socratic) tradition distinct from any other philosophical tradition; the emphasis is on a dynamic process of conflict, rather than a static body of received wisdom. There's someone in our midst who claims to be wise? Very well then, let's put his wisdom to the test, let's see how much he really knows. The principal figure is not the sage, but the prankster, the rabble-rouser. (I would speculate that this impulse in the European mind is part of why empirical science, industrialization, and broadly speaking "modern civilization" in general, arose first in the West and not anywhere else.)
Right. Well, this position is not alien to Western philosophy itself. You can find it in Heidegger (Plato as introducing the terrible mistake of thinking that Being as such could be identical with a specific being, the Form of the Good, the Christian God, or what have you), you can find it in Nietzsche (Socrates as physical symptom of a degenerating and sickly organism), and others.
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