ABSTRACT
A symposium, as it was understood in ancient Greece, was a drinking party. The underlying motive for supporting a social gathering of philosophers and their friends with substances – mainly alcohol – that seduce to more uncontrolled expression of opinions and more extroverted behaviour in general is very interesting: in spelling out more daring hypotheses, in expressing wild emotional feelings of love and hate with respect to the views of other participants of the symposium, in showing deep despair in one moment and unfounded excessive joy in the next, in being hard to understand and slowly falling into speechless meditation, in all these exceptional developments well-respected authorities tacitly escaped authority in the course of an ongoing symposium. Giving up on exerting one’s authority makes it easier to pay deference to other participants’ authority, or more precisely, to pay attention to the content of what they are saying.
