SOCRATES

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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)

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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).

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• Born in Athens to a sculptor and mid-wife, he
  learned his fathers 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.

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• 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.

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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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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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 dont know how to be
  happy, thus we give to vice and evil is ignorance.

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• Men are evil because they dont understand
  absolute justice and morality.
• We cannot know true knowledge or morality without
  lifelong philosophical investigation.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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