Allan Bloom’s Lectures on Socrates (Boston College, 1983)

Accord­ing to Archive.org: “Allan Bloom deliv­ered this talk as part of the series enti­tled “Philo­soph­ic Per­spec­tives” at Boston Col­lege in 1983. The series was intend­ed to help teach­ers of under­grad­u­ates in their teach­ing of those great works that are essen­tial to a lib­er­al edu­ca­tion. The series addressed the decline of lib­er­al learn­ing in the Uni­ver­si­ties, in Amer­i­ca espe­cial­ly. In this lec­ture Bloom dis­cuss­es the found­ing of the idea of lib­er­al edu­ca­tion, and the mean­ing of the philo­soph­ic life expressed in the exam­ple of Socrates. The con­flict between Phi­los­o­phy and the City, or Phi­los­o­phy and Polit­i­cal Life is explored by way of an inter­pre­ta­tion of Pla­to’s Apol­o­gy of Socrates.”

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