Education / Explore
Education / Explore
Socrates
Dialogue with a philosopher. The conversational avatar presented at the Festival del Classico, now available for classrooms and universities.
01 / The Solution
Socrates did not teach by giving answers. He asked questions until his interlocutor discovered what he really thought, and why. Twenty-five centuries later, students still meet him only on the page.
Socrates is a conversational avatar developed at e-REAL Labs and presented at Politecnico di Torino during the Festival del Classico. Participants talk directly with the philosopher: his questions bring out assumptions, alternatives, and the reasons behind one’s ideas. His content rests on a secure knowledge base curated and controlled by Centro Studi Logos together with the Festival’s Scientific Committee, built from source texts on Socrates, his trial, and ancient Greek law. The avatar does not quote the texts: it knows them, and plays its part. Built by a mixed team of philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, and jurists working with engineers.
Available for secondary schools, licei, universities, and cultural institutions, online, in the classroom, on totems and projected walls, or in immersive rooms; in Italian and other languages. Activities, from a single dialogue to a staged trial prepared with the avatar’s help, are designed with the teachers.
02 / How It Works
01
Prepare the encounter
Choose the theme and the texts the class is studying: the Apology, the dialogues, the trial, justice and the laws. Teachers set objectives and how the dialogue fits the lesson.
02
Talk with Socrates
Students ask questions in natural language, on their own device or in front of the class. Socrates answers with questions: what do you mean, on what basis, what follows. Assumptions and alternatives come out.
03
Return to the texts
Teachers guide source checking and separate the character’s reconstruction from the documentation. Four things to observe: quality of questions, link between answer and source, comparison of perspectives, awareness of the limits of reconstruction.
04
Stage the trial
From the dialogue to the trial of Socrates: students prepare accusation and defense with the avatar’s help, then stage the trial in class or on stage, as at the Festival del Classico.