Torpedo fish

Kingdom Animalia
Phylum Chordata
Class Chondrichthyes
Order Torpediniformes

The torpedo fish is not a fish in the traditional, preschool drawing of a fish sense. Those fish belong to the class Osteichthyes, otherwise known as fish-not-appearing-in-this-writeup.

Torpedo fish are icky creatures that we might call electric eels. As a defense mechanism, they shock the living beejebus out of anything that touches them, paralyzing their predators temporarily so they can make their escape.

I am not a biologist, so I have no idea how the torpedo fish generates an electric current. If you want to know, I'm sure you could find a repository of useful, interconnected knowledge. My encounters with the torpedo fish come from a far different source — philosophy. In the Meno, after its title character is refuted several times, he describes Socrates as such:

MENO: "Indeed, if a joke is in order, you seem, in appearance and in every other way, to be like the broad torpedo fish, for it too makes anyone who comes close and touches it feel numb, and you now seem to have had that kind of effect on me, for both my mind and my tongue are numb, and I have no answer to give you." (Grube trans., 80a-b)

*The greek used here means something like "flat stunning thing from the sea", or perhaps "broad sea-stunner", but really, how many of those things are there?

The joke here is that, by all accounts, Socrates was quite ugly, and had a rather severe pug nose. Of course, others would claim he was beautiful on the inside, but that's another story for another day.

The numbness, by the way, that Meno describes here, is the numbness that comes when the illusion of knowledge is shown to be incorrect (as usually is the result of Socratic dialogues). What better image to use than the torpedo fish to describe the paralyzation of the soul that Socrates' questioning has led him to?

These days, however, the torpedo fish is less well known. So we must lay blame for the numbness of our soul on the genus Felis.

What? Cat got your tongue?

Moderately interesting biological taxonomy happily ganked from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_ray.