In this presentation, Roger examines Plato's Euthyphro, in which Socrates encounters Euthyphro outside an Athenian courthouse—Socrates about to defend himself against charges of corrupting the youth, Euthyphro about to prosecute his own father for murder. Rather than settling on a definition of "holiness," the dialogue is treated as a demonstration of how untrained thought inevitably circles back on itself, trapped in tautology and opinion, unable to reach the archetypal "idea" behind any ideal. We trace how Socrates uses Plato's method of pairs and polarities to expose this circularity, why philosophic inquiry was inseparable from the birth of Athenian democracy (and threatening to the old mythic, authoritarian order that killed him for it), and how Euthyphro's disorientation—his intellectual "vertigo" when his opinions stop holding still—is reframed not as failure but as the necessary first sign of real interiority opening up, a theme linking Plato's insight to Gnostic cosmology, Jungian shadow-work, and the enduring human resistance to genuine self-examination.

More information about these presentations can be found at
https://sharedpresencefoundation.org/presentations/plato
https://sharedpresencefoundation.org/presentations/platos-theory-of-education
https://sharedpresencefoundation.org/presentations/plato-ii

More presentations by Roger Weir are available at the Shared Presence Foundation website and on our YouTube channel