Saturday, February 12, 2011

Socratic Question Format

I thought I would take a moment to set down one of the aspects of Big Questions that new people to the meeting may not be familiar with. This is the format of the question itself. Socrates was fond of the "What is ..." question. What is justice? What is duty? What is honor? That sort of thing. When I suggest topics for specific BQ meetings I intend to use the same sort of format, and hope that the dialectic method of examining these questions will be used by the participants.

In recent meetings where the floor has been thrown open to popular selection of the topic, these are the questions that have been selected: What is friendship? What is marriage? What is love? What is the meaning of life? Perhaps one of these will be selected. Perhaps another. We will have to see.

2 comments:

  1. And we'll see if it's one topic or many, depending on the flow. Will the one who suggests the topic be the facilitator as well?

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  2. Sometimes. People seem to defer to me to facilitate, and I am usually fine with tthat.

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