Transcript socrates - WorldGeographyA

SOCRATES
“Western philosophy began with Socrates
and Plato. All philosophers after him are
merely reacting to or commenting on his
philosophy.” (Alain Badiou, 20th century
French philosopher)
Life of Socrates:
• Socrates did not write anything, thus we
only know his views from 2nd hand
reports, written by later philosophers.
• 3 contemporary commentators were Plato
the philosopher (his student), Xenophon
the historian (his friend), and
Aristophanes the playwright (an
acquaintance).
• Born in Athens to a sculptor and mid-wife,
he learned his father’s art but devoted
himself to philosophy, for which he
became well known, and for which
neglected his family life and avoided
politics.
• Although not really poor, he chose to live a
very non-material and semi-vagabond
lifestyle.
• A dutiful and lawful citizen, he served in the army and is
present many Athenian public records of the time.
• In philosophizing and teaching the youth, he gave rise to
an intellectual aristocracy which opposed tyranny and
question Athenian convention, leading to general
malcontent, popular hostility and personal hatred against
him.
• This crystallized and took juridical form when he was
accused of corrupting youth, denying the national gods;
and then tried and executed by the state.
Socrates’ Reaction to Sophism:
• The Sophists defence of the relativism of
knowledge and morality led to scepticism
and then hedonism.
• They violently attacked the traditional
beliefs about right and justice, leading to a
doctrine of extremism.
• The Sophist morality was to strengthen
one's personality in order to surpass
others in violence and in the contest or
struggle for earthly goods, as well as
“might makes right”.
• Socrates was reacting to this Sophist trend
in democratic Athens.
• Socrates tried to restore the values of a
sacred and absolute morality based upon
reason and logic.
• Agreed with their humanism and
dismissed cosmology, but rejected sophist
relativism and nihilism.
• After Socrates, the Sophists did not
entirely disappear; but lost all their
influence and importance.
• Socrates concentrated all his attention on
the search for moral concepts, convinced
that the practice of morality must be
preceded by a concept of justice.
Socrates’ Doctrines’:
• True knowledge and ideas, morals and
concepts, are universal and absolute;
common to all men and to all times; it is
objective not subjective, and is not subject
to the changes of fortune.
• We all want happiness but don’t know how
to be happy, thus we give to vice and evil
is ignorance.
• Men are evil because they don’t
understand absolute justice and morality.
• We cannot know true knowledge or
morality without lifelong philosophical
investigation.
• We must be able to define concepts like
holiness, justice and morality in order to know
what they are, and we must know what they are
in order to be holy, just and moral.
• Socrates did not claim to know anything, but he
claimed to try to discover by questioning
everything and determining what they were not,
thus the Socratic Method.
• “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know
nothing.”
• He was interested in human activities, concepts
and institutions, and subjected them to objective
reason.
• He questioned Homeric religion and ethics, but
believed that the universe was guided by a god
with a sense of purpose, a god that was the
source of human consciousness and morality.