philosophy: sophists, socrates, plato
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The Sophists
The professional teachers providing instruction and guidance fir success in practical affairs
They specialized in using the tools of philosophy and Rhetoric for the purpose of teaching arete
(excellence, or virtue)
Rhetoric is the art and study of the use of language with persuasive effect
The sophists shifted the concerns of philosophy to the study of human cognition
The real world is quite different from the phenomenal world
The Sophists took for the standard the opinions of the individual
Absolute knowledge is impossible
All understanding is subjective
Truth is no more than opinion
Any opinion can be judged only by its practical utility
Protagoras
"Man is the measure of all things, of those which are that they are and of those which are not that they are
not."
For man the world is what it appear to him to be, not something else
There are 2 criteria for truth
The opinion of the individual
The practical utility of knowledgeKnowledge is subjective
Moral judgments are relative
Everything is true
The true aim of human thought is to serve human needs
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Socratesa classical Greek philosopher one of the founders of Western philosophy
The Apology ("defense-speech)
It is Plato's account of Socrates' defense at his trial
Socrates wrote nothing because he felt that knowledge was a living, interactive thing
Xenophon, Plato and others wrote Socratic dialogues portraying his teaching in literary form
Socrates was the first philosopher to shift the focus away from the natural world to human values
Socrates was interested in the practical use of reason
Socrates tried to find the basis for stable and certain knowledge
The way to attain reliable knowledge is based on the practice ofconversation
Dialectic method of inquiry or the Socratic method
It is a negative method of truth-seeking, in that truth is found by steadily identifying and eliminating that
which is not true
Socrates' method of philosophical inquiry consisted in questioning people on the positions they asserted and
working them through questions into a contradiction, thus proving to them that their original assertion was
wrong
Socrates himself never takes a position
This method of questioning is elenchus or "cross-examination"
The Socratic elenchus gave rise to dialecticIt is the idea that truth needs to be pursued by modifying one's position through questioning and conflict
with opposing ideas
It was designed to force one to examine one's own beliefs and the validity of such beliefs
Socrates showed the value of self-knowledge
The highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others
The instrument of clear thought is a definition
Only true knowledge is knowledge of concepts
What it is that makes men say that a certain thing or action is good or beautiful?
What people are looking at when they make such statements?
It is the Eidos, or the Idea
that a person has before him when he calls something "good or beautiful.There is something into things that never varied and never passed away
It is Idea of something (EIDOS)
Socrates did not separate Ideas from things
By the process of definition the mind can distinguish between two objects of thought
The particular The general (the Idea of something)Socrates distinguished two levels of knowledge
One is based upon the inspection of facts The other is based on interpretation of factsTeleology is a view that things have a function or purpose
Plato regarded Socrates as the father ofethics or moral philosophy,and hence philosophy in general
Knowledge is virtue
The best life comes from taking the best care to make oneself as good as possible, and the happiest people
are those who are most conscious they are getting better
All of the virtues must be cultivated together
human wisdom begins with the recognition of one's own ignorance the unexamined life is not worth living ethical virtue is the only thing that matters a good person can never be harmed, because whatever misfortune he may suffer, his virtue willremain intact
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Plato
In about 387 Plato founded the Academy as an institute for the systematic pursuit of philosophical and
scientific teaching and research
Philosophical education consists of intellectual activity including mathematics astronomy geometry music
The 1st
group of dialogues (Socratic dialogues) includes the problems ofEthics
The 2nd
group of dialogues includes the theory of knowledge
Plato brought together all the major concerns of human thought into a whole and clear organization of
knowledge
Myth of the cave in the 7th
book of Politeia: He who sees with his eyes is blind
Reality is unavailable to those who use their senses
What is the really real? What is knowable and what is real? What is the nature of ultimate reality and how
we come to know it?
Plato tried to discover the ultimate constituents of reality and the grounds for our knowledge of them
Sensescant be trusted. What we experience through senses is illusion
The real things if they exist must be: unchangeable, not be accessible to the senses
The really existing things of the world are not of this world but of someplace else
There are 2 worlds: the intelligible world of Ideas and the visible world of things
The world as it seems to us is not the real world, but only an image or copy of the real worldA world of Ideas (a world beyond that of the senses) All of the things that men perceive with their senses
appear to be but very imperfect copies of the eternal Ideas
The Forms are eternal, unchangeable patterns, of which the particular objects of sense are imperfect copies
Forms are related to particulars in that a particular is regarded as a copy of its form
A particular apple is a copy of the form ofApplehood. The apple's redness is an instance of the form ofRedness
Participation is another relationship between forms and particulars
Platonic Epistemology
Men, in construing a system of knowledge, constantly prefer what is more perfect to what is less perfect
Four states of mind
Imagining is the sense experience of appearances wherein these appearances are taken as true realityBeliefis induced by the seeing of actual object
Imagining and Belief are only opinions
Thinking represents the power of mind to abstract from the visible world
When a person moves from believing to thinking, he moves from the visible world to the intelligible world,
from the realm of opinion to the realm of knowledge
Knowledge is the apprehension of unchanging Forms and their relationships to one another
The knowledge must be present in an eternal, non-experiential form
The Platonic doctrine of recollection or anamnesis
Souls are born with the concepts of the Forms
The soul once lived in "Reality It once knew everything, but forgot it
Knowledge is acquired by Recollection/ The goal of Recollection is to get back to true knowledgeKnowledge is innate.
It is a matter of recollection, but not of learning, observation, or study
"Plato believed that ideas were far more real than the natural world.
He advised the astronomers not to waste their time observing the stars and planets. It was better, he believed,
just to think about them (Carl Sagan)