Professor Sophie-Grace Chappell talks civil disobedience in the ancient world, and its ramifications for today.

Socrates was unjustly sentenced to death in 399 BC for crimes that he certainly didn’t commit: “corrupting the youth” and “denying the gods”. Should Socrates have broken the law and committed an act of civil disobedience by running away? Socrates’s own answer, as explained in Plato’s dialogue The Crito, is that the only thing that justice allowed him to do was stay and face execution. Was Socrates right about this? Professor Sophie-Grace Chappell from the Open University will look at Plato’s Crito to try and answer this question.  

Sophie Grace Chappell is a philosopher whose main research concern is the relation between objectivity and history. She wants to understand what it is for ethical truths to be both objective, and also the product of long and often haphazard historical processes.