La nuova paideia di Socrate

This paper tackles Socrates’s paideia as conceptualized in the texts of Aristophanes (esp. Clouds) and the major Socratics (esp. Aristippus, Antisthenes, Phaedo, Aeschines, Plato, and Xenophon). I claim that a central feature of Socratic paideia, which can be observed throughout these authors, is its absolute novelty if compared to traditional Athenian paideia. In fact, Socrates’s idea of paideia stands at odds with both gymnastike and mousike. Its major features are eros and protreptics, which entail a non-dogmatic and non-doctrinal approach to knowledge and teaching. Both the Socrates of Aristophanes’s phrontisterion and the Socrates depicted by his close associates regard the “cure of the soul” as a basic tenet. The cure of the soul is not a doctrine, as it does not convey specific notions or ideas: on the contrary, it aims to provide the interlocutor with means to deconstruct any pre-established (false) knowledge, and thus improve his soul.