an even bigger myth than the cave

Cameron’s right about this, I think:

“I’m just catching up on your blog (I usually cut myself off from the intertubes for the weekend) and saw your post on philosophical myths. While Plato is of course the greatest mythmonger in the history, it seems to me that by far the most influential of his mythoi is not the Cave story that you mention, but the one that isn’t in one of the dialogues, but made up of the dialogues themselves: the story of the life, trial, and death of Socrates. That’s really the founding myth of western philosophy.”

More generally, Plato’s Socrates is such a gigantic, profession-constructing myth that we forget it’s a myth.