The arc ends where the show's name comes from. Was Socrates a philosophical martyr or have we romanticized the story to inflate our own purpose? If we retcon our own wants, thoughts, and feelings, are we capable of retconning history to better inflate our own self? Episode one's concept, applied to the show's own founding myth. If this arc made you worse, was it actually worth it? Fifth and last episode in Arc One, The Unreliable Narrator. Arc Two begins in January.

Readings:

Plato, Apology. Read two translations; Grube and Reeve are both standard.
Plato, Crito and the last pages of Phaedo Xenophon, Apology.
The other contemporary portrait. I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (1988).
The political reading. Robin Waterfield, Why Socrates Died (2009).

Try to lie to yourself. Right now, on purpose. You can’t. To tell a lie you have to know the truth, and to be taken in by one you have to not know it, and self-deception asks you to be both at once, in one head. So either there’s a hidden room where the truth gets kept, or self-deception is not what we think it is.

Episode four of Arc One, The Unreliable Narrator. The first three episodes all assumed you can keep something from yourself. This one asks whether that’s possible. Freud and Donald Davidson say yes: the mind has parts, and one of them holds the truth behind a door. Alfred Mele says there’s no door, no room, and no one in there who knows. Just wanting, which has weight, and a floor that tilts.

In this episode: the static and dynamic paradoxes of self-deception; Davidson’s partitioned mind and Sartre’s objection to the censor; Mele’s deflationary account and the four small ways wanting bends evidence; why surgical avoidance seems to need a navigator; where the blame goes if nobody ever decided; and the host catching himself preferring the theory that lets him off.

Tea: Bai Mu Dan.

This isn’t an episode about your phone. Doomscrolling is just the easiest example to catch yourself.

You can want to stop and keep going. But we don’t treat them as equals. We think of the one that wants to stop as the real you and the other one an intrusion, a hijacking of your free will. But the one you call you is the one that loses most nights. Why is that?

Harry Frankfurt’s answer dates back way before cellphones.

Reading, chapters, and the transcript are at teawithsocrates.com.