Round table "Interpretations of Socrates" - XXV World Congress of Philosophy, Rome 2024

The history of interpretations of Socrates covers the entire span of the history of philosophy, ranging from the earliest followers of Socrates – each of whom provided their own view of Socratic philosophy – to the historiographical trends that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries. The proposed round table aims to discuss crucial highlights of this history: notably, the speakers will address the following key moments: (1) the (often conflicting) interpretations of the 5th-4th century (Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato), as well as the scholarly trends that stress the ‘interaction’ among the first-generation Socratics and take into account the constraints of the literary genres they employ; (2) the interpretation of Socratic literature provided by major German and French scholars in 19th and 20th century (Schleiermacher, Gigon, Foucault, and Hadot among others); (3) the image of Socrates as reconstructed by the philosophical historiography of the late 20th century in Italy, with special regard to the studies of the so-called ‘Roman school’ by Guido Calogero and Gabriele Giannantoni; (4) the major interpretive trends of the mid- to late 20th and early 21st centuries in the Anglophone world and their application to the study of (Plato’s) Socrates (e.g. analytic method, constructivist and anti-constructivist approaches, the Straussian movement, literary interpretative methods); (5) the recent Socratic literature in Portuguese and Spanish.