Here I solve the mystery of my flunking Freshman Humanities at MIT. I wrote a paper on Plato’s The Republic. The paper got the highest grade that I achieved in that class, a D+. My complete grade for the semester was F.

In my paper, I complained about the logic of the dialogue between Socrates and his students. It turns out, the paper the professor chose to read in front of the class was one written by a friend. My friend’s paper gave high praise to a certain section on Socrates that I had warned him about. I told him that the section he liked was circular logic.

After all these years, I think I found my vindication in Michael Hudson’s book J is For Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception. This was a vindication for my distaste for the logic of Socrates.

All these years, over 50 of them,I couldn’t quite figure out the link between Sophist and Socrates. I always assumed the word sophistry was derived from the name of the playwrite Sophocles. WikiPedia straightened me out in the article on Socrates. Emphasis added by me.

However, in The Clouds, Aristophanes portrays Socrates as accepting payment for teaching and running a Sophist school with Chaerephon.

I wonder why my non-engineer humanities professor didn’t know this to reward me for figuring out the flaws in Socrates’ logic on my own.