Event: MCA public lecture
Date: 28 October 2022
Time: 19:00
Venue: National Musuem of Archaeology
The (Malta Classics Association) will be hosting an event later this month which will be a resumption of our Malta Annual Plato Lecture, this time entitled 'Fashioning Socrates: the Sage, the Fool, and the Octopus' and to be delivered by Prof. Jean-Paul de Lucca.
Legendary and elusive, yet authoritative and inspiring, the figure of Socrates has been the object of fascination for more than two millennia. Attempts to reconstruct the personality and teachings of the historical Socrates can never escape what has come to be known as the ‘Socratic problem’, the contradictory accounts of his life and ideas given by his contemporaries. The history of Socrates is very much the history of the transmission and reception of his fashioning by later authors. In this lecture, Professor Jean-Paul De Lucca will look at the fashioning of Socrates through a selection of key sources from Antiquity, the Christian and Islamic Middle Ages, and the Italian and Northern Renaissance.
Plato’s fashioning of Socrates gradually but steadily emerges as the predominant account of his teacher’s life and ideas. This provides an important backdrop for understanding how more recent philosophers such as Nietzsche, Derrida and Hadot have engaged, both admiringly and critically, with the ostensibly self-fashioned Gadfly.
We shall be meeting on Friday, 28 October at the National Museum of Archaeology in Valletta. The lecture will commence at 19:00. Kindly inform the attendants at the door that you are there for our public lecture so that they may direct you upstairs. Entrance is free and open to the general public, and there is no need to register.
