{"id":4711,"date":"2018-03-07T15:07:35","date_gmt":"2018-03-07T15:07:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/03\/07\/misattributed-to-socrates\/"},"modified":"2018-03-07T15:07:35","modified_gmt":"2018-03-07T15:07:35","slug":"misattributed-to-socrates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/03\/07\/misattributed-to-socrates\/","title":{"rendered":"Misattributed to Socrates"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a foe of misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression.  Have I ever done any of these things?  Probably.  'Suffering' as I do from cacoethes scribendi<\/em>, it is a good bet that I have committed one or more of the above.  But I try to avoid these 'sins.'<\/span><\/p>\n

This morning I was reading from Karl Menninger, M.D., Whatever Became of Sin?<\/em> (Hawthorn Books, 1973).  On p. 156, I found this quotation:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Our youth today love luxury.  They have bad manners, contempt for authority, disrespect for older people.  Children nowadays are tyrants.  They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the bottom of the page there is a footnote that reads:  "Socrates, circa 425 B. C.  Quoted in Joel Fort, The Pleasure Seekers<\/em> (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969)."<\/span><\/p>\n

I was immediately skeptical of this 'quotation.'  In part because I had never encountered the passage in the Platonic dialogues I have read, but also because the quotation is second-hand.  So I took to the 'Net and found what appears to be a reputable site, Quote Investigator<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Therein a pertinent post entitled Misbehaving Children in Ancient Times? Plato or Socrates?<\/a> It turns out that  the answer is neither.  The above quotation, or rather something very close to it,<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

. . . was crafted by a student, Kenneth John Freeman, for his Cambridge dissertation published in 1907. Freeman did not claim that the passage under analysis was a direct quotation of anyone; instead, he was presenting his own summary of the complaints directed against young people in ancient times. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am a foe of misquotation, misattribution, the retailing of unsourced quotations, the passing off of unchecked second-hand quotations, and sense-altering context suppression.  Have I ever done any of these things?  Probably.  'Suffering' as I do from cacoethes scribendi, it is a good bet that I have committed one or more of the above.  But I … Continue reading “Misattributed to Socrates”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[299],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-studiousness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4711"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4711\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}