Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…They’re silly, yes. Maybe it’s a bit like Boswell and Johnson, where Boswell makes Johnson much better. Boswell, in some ways, is smarter than Johnson, I would say, or sharper. Socrates was just pretty smart, but Plato’s the true philosopher. Can you talk me out of that? I think that’s a perfectly reasonable point of view, yes. I’m sure that Socrates didn’t have the whole edifice of metaphysics. Also, obviously, he wasn’t the enormously impressive literary stylist that Plato is. Plato was both an extraordinary writer and an extraordinary thinker. It does seem as if there’s good evidence — partly because Aristotle seems to confirm this — that Socrates himself did come up with some pretty interesting ideas, such as the idea that nobody willingly does wrong. Insofar as anybody does anything wrong, it’s because of a mistake. We don’t realize it’s wrong, which I think is actually still something which is worth some ethical, philosophical grappling. It’s an idea that’s worth some grappling.…

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