Socrates

<aside> šŸ’” Professorā€™s Questions

  • Do you think most people lean to be wanting to be more right then get it right?

  • What does it mean to examine your life?

    • youā€™re kind of living life passively </aside>

<aside> šŸ’” Quotes

  • ā€œThe Unexamined Life is Not Worth Livingā€ </aside>

<aside> āœ Notes:

  • Socrates doesnā€™t see himself as a teacher but rather as a midwife and help others to learn - midwife of ideas

  • the goal is to know thyself

  • Socrates

    • 470 to 399 BCE

    • Socratic Dialectic/Method of constant questioning by revealing flaws in arguments; vague, imprecise, and ambigous definitions, counterexamples, etc

    • comes from a modest background

    • oracle of Delphi said he was the wisest in all Athens, yet he claimed to be ignorant

    • to know the good is to do the good and nobody chooses to do bad; it happens out of ignorance and corrupts the soul

    • you cannot harm a good person

    • direct democracy is no good - wise philosophers best fit to run government

  • Socratic Method

    • this is still with us today

    • Converstational method with questions

    • demand for clarity and logical rigor

    • terms have definitate meanings (versus the relativism claimed by the Socratists)

  • Epistemology

    • the truth can be found within the socratic method helps us with this

    • this would later come to be called ā€œinnate ideasā€

  • metaphysics

    • he was more concerned with the human condition and situation rather than metaphysics but he did have a few related interests:

      • the soul is the true self; the most important task in life is to take care of the soul

      • the excellent soul is wise, orderly

  • ethics

    • morality is an art of living; the most important goal in life is living well

    • virtue is excellence of function

    • knowledge and virtue are the same, as knowledge of virtue is wisdom

    • vice and ignorance are the same thing

    • nobody knowingly does bad

  • political philosophy

    • socrates distrusted the direct democracy of athens - an elite, select, qualified, reasonable, etc group should run gov.(those with philosophical wisdom)

    • there is a natural law that is above society(it is not relative)

  • socrates

    • significance

    • ingluenced so many(especially plato) and many schools

    • argued against skepticism and relativism - socrates argued that genuine knowledge is possible - advanced epistemology

    • argued that we achieve knowledge via the dialectic - co-opretative </aside>