As a youth, he showed an appetite for learning. Plato describes him eagerly acquiring the writings of the leading contemporary philosopher Anaxagoras and says he was taught rhetoric by Aspasia , the talented mistress of the great Athenian leader Pericles.
As an infantryman, Socrates showed great physical endurance and courage, rescuing the future Athenian leader Alcibiades during the siege of Potidaea in B. Wikimedia Commons. Despite his intellect and connections, he rejected the sort of fame and power that Athenians were expected to strive for.
His lifestyle—and eventually his death—embodied his spirit of questioning every assumption about virtue, wisdom and the good life. For both, the Socrates that appears bears the mark of the writer. One of the greatest paradoxes that Socrates helped his students explore was whether weakness of will—doing wrong when you genuinely knew what was right—ever truly existed.
He seemed to think otherwise: people only did wrong when at the moment the perceived benefits seemed to outweigh the costs.
Socrates was also deeply interested in understanding the limits of human knowledge. When he was told that the Oracle at Delphi had declared that he was the wisest man in Athens, Socrates balked until he realized that, although he knew nothing, he was unlike his fellow citizens keenly aware of his own ignorance.
Socrates avoided political involvement where he could and counted friends on all sides of the fierce power struggles following the end of the Peloponnesian War. In B. Three years later, when a tyrannical Athenian government ordered Socrates to participate in the arrest and execution of Leon of Salamis, he refused—an act of civil disobedience that Martin Luther King, Jr. The tyrants were forced from power before they could punish Socrates, but in he was indicted for failing to honor the Athenian gods and for corrupting the young.
Although some historians suggest that there may have been political machinations behind the trial, he was condemned on the basis of his thought and teaching. Socrates is unique among the great philosophers in that he is portrayed and remembered as a quasi-saint or religious figure. His passion for definitions and hair-splitting questions inspired the development of formal logic and systematic ethics from the time of Aristotle through the Renaissance and into the modern era.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present.
The Athenian philosopher Plato c. True to his ideals, Plato also permitted women to attend! The Academy would become the center of Greek learning for almost a millennium.
Plato can be understood as idealistic and rationalistic, much like Pythagoras but much less mystical. He divides reality into two: On the one hand we have ousia, idea or ideal. This is ultimate reality, permanent, eternal, spiritual. Phenomena are appearances -- things as they seem to us -- and are associated with matter, time, and space. Phenomena are illusions which decay and die. Ideals are unchanging, perfect.
Phenomena are definitely inferior to Ideals! The idea of a triangle -- the defining mathematics of it, the form or essence of it -- is eternal. Any individual triangle, the triangles of the day-to-day experiential world, are never quite perfect: They may be a little crooked, or the lines a little thick, or the angles not quite right They only approximate that perfect triangle, the ideal triangle.
If it seems strange to talk about ideas or ideals as somehow more real than the world of our experiences, consider science. If you believe that there is order in the universe, that nature has laws, you believe in ideas!
Ideas are available to us through thought, while phenomena are available to us through our senses. So, naturally, thought is a vastly superior means to get to the truth. This is what makes Plato a rationalist, as opposed to an empiricist, in epistemology.
Senses can only give you information about the ever-changing and imperfect world of phenomena, and so can only provide you with implications about ultimate reality, not reality itself. Reason goes straight to the idea. According to Plato, the phenomenal world strives to become ideal, perfect, complete. Ideals are, in that sense, a motivating force. In fact, he identifies the ideal with God and perfect goodness. If the world is not perfect, it is not because of God or the ideals, but because the raw materials were not perfect.
I think you can see why the early Christian church made Plato an honorary Christian, even though he died three and a half centuries before Christ! The soul includes reason, of course, as well as self-awareness and moral sense.
Plato says the soul will always choose to do good, if it recognizes what is good. This is a similar conception of good and bad as the Buddhists have: Rather than bad being sin, it is considered a matter of ignorance. So, someone who does something bad requires education, not punishment.
The soul is drawn to the good, the ideal, and so is drawn to God. We gradually move closer and closer to God through reincarnation as well as in our individual lives. Our ethical goal in life is resemblance to God, to come closer to the pure world of ideas and ideal, to liberate ourselves from matter, time, and space, and to become more real in this deeper sense. Our goal is, in other words, self-realization. Plato talks about three levels of pleasure.
First is sensual or physical pleasure, of which sex is a great example. But the highest level is ideal pleasure, the pleasures of the mind. Here the example would be Platonic love, intellectual love for another person unsullied by physical involvement. Paralleling these three levels of pleasure are three souls. We have one soul called appetite, which is mortal and comes from the gut.
The second soul is called spirit or courage. It is also mortal, and lives in the heart. The third soul is reason. It is immortal and resides in the brain. The three are strung together by the cerebrospinal canal. Plato is fond of analogies. Appetite, he says, is like a wild horse, very powerful, but likes to go its own way.
Spirit is like a thoroughbred, refined, well trained, directed power. And reason is the charioteer, goal-directed, steering both horses according to his will. In The Republic , he designs through Socrates a society in order to discover the meaning of justice. They till the soil and produce goods, i. The warriors represent the spirit and courage of the society. And the philosopher kings guide the society, as reason guides our lives. Plato: Works and Contributions The Ancient Greeks have been credited with many contributions to society throughout history.
Out of these contributions non other was more influential to modern times than Philosophy. Western Philosophy as we know it today was studied by many such as Anaximander and Hippocrates and even Socrates, who taught to use systematic questioning to explain the truths of the universe by teaching his students to take nothing for granted.
Plato's parents spared no expense in educating him; he was taught at the finest schools. He was taught by Socrates and defended Socrates when he was on trial. Plato traveled to Italy and may have even visited Egypt before founding The Academy. Plato also visited Sicily and instructed a young king there before returning to The Academy to teach for twenty years before his death in BC at the age of eighty.
Wikimedia Foundation, 08 Feb. Little is known of his early years, but he was given the finest education Athens had to offer the scions of its noble families, and he devoted his considerable talents to politics and the writing of tragedy and other forms of poetry. His acquaintance with Socrates altered the course of his life. The compelling power which Socrates's methods and arguments had over the minds of the youth of Athens gripped Plato as firmly as it did so many others, and he became a close associate of Socrates.
His uncle, Critias, was the leader of the Thirty Tyrants who were installed in power by the victorious Spartans. Aristotle and Plato are two of the most influential philosophers in history. Together Aristotle and Plato, along with Socrates, laid the groundwork for what we now know as Western philosophy and science. Plato, in addition to being a philosopher, wrestled at the Olympic level, is one of the classical Greek authors, mathematicians and the founder of The Academy, the first higher learning institute in the west.
He was a student of Socrates and the Dialogues of Plato are thought to be the recorded teachings of Socrates. Home Page Plato: A student of Socrates. Plato: A student of Socrates Good Essays. Open Document. Essay Sample Check Writing Quality. A student of Socrates, a major western civilization influence, and an amazing philosopher, Plato was his name and he was one of the most influential persons in history.
0コメント