Alonso tordesillas biography sample writing
The twelve essays are well arranged, and we move smoothly from moral psychology to religion to method to politics to economics.
His biographies are narrated reporting positive and negative cases since both strategies serve to reconstruct and to fashion the “right model.” Some negative.
The Memorabilia is at the center most of the time, save for the final two essays on the Oeconomicus. It is one of the great virtues of these essays that they read Xenophon in his own right, rather than simply as a poor relation of Plato. A more ambitious introduction could have pulled together the themes of these varied essays. The almost complete lack of any cross-references in the essays themselves is also unfortunate, if understandable in a volume of proceedings.
One sometimes encounters here entirely different readings of the same passage, with no hint on how the authors would or did react to each other.
Alonso de Castillo Solorzano was a Spanish novelist and playwright whose ingenuity expressed itself best in his short stories.
Several such essays here left this reader somewhat breathless, if also, without exception, with much food for thought. Ah, to have been in Provence not only for the papers but for the discussion about them! As a matter of fact, though, none of the pieces in this volume is particularly oriented toward the study of the immediate reception of Socrates, 4 and a number of them raise the officially bracketed question of the historical Socrates, a question rather difficult to avoid, as it turns out.
Morrison goes on to suggest how we might address various apparent contradictions between psychological egoism and other views Xenophon attributes to Socrates. Xenophon says that one who knows what he ought to do always does it Mem. But this slight diachronic weakness of will is to be distinguished from the graver, synchronic weakness of will, Medea killing her children while knowing full well how wrong it is to do so.
This suggestion strikes me as decidedly implausible. The standard view, that Socrates is joking about his male friends, the presence of one of whom would lead him to neglect the beautiful Theodote, makes far better sense of the immediate context. The girlfriends at issue need to be feminine in keeping with the heterosexual sic!