INTRODUCTION TO SOCRATES
With comforts often come the decline in traditional values
Critias (ca. 460-403 BC) challenged the gods’ existence
As the laws did hold men back from deeds of open violence, but still such deeds were done in secret, -then as I maintain, some shrewd man first, a man in counsel wise, discovered unto men the fear of Gods, thereby to frighten sinners should they sin even secretly in deed, or word, or thought. Hence, was it that he brought in Deity.
Dialogues of Plato
1) Euthyphro
Socrates questions young Euthyphro on the nature of piety.
Socrates challenges the notion that we can ever know what the gods want…
2) The Apology ("Defense of Socrates)
399 BC: Trial
404 BC: End of Peloponnesian Wars
Scapegoating Socrates
Problem of democracy- what to do when majority is unjust?
Accusers: from politician, poet, artisan classes. Try to lump Socrates in with Sophists (paid teachers, foreigners, mislead youth, destroy religion)
Socrates and negative knowledge
-Socrates claims not to be a teacher.
The mission of Socrates
3) Crito
Put soul over body
It is better to suffer injustice than to be unjust
4) Symposium
Dialogue on love
Love and the Forms
One who approaches love uses particular examples of beauty:
"like a ladder, climbing from the love of one person to love of two; from two to love of all physical beauty; from physical beauty to beauty in human behavior; thence to beauty in all subjects of study; from them he arrives finally at that branch of knowledge which studies nothing but ultimate beauty. Then at last he understands what true beauty is."
Forms, Immortality, the Soul
Plato also builds on his immortal forms and offers arguments for the immortality of the soul in his account of Socrates’s hour of death, the Phaedo. One important argument castes the existence of an undying soul in reference to the immaterial Forms:
Then the soul is more like the invisible than the body; and the body is like the visible…Have we not also said that, when the soul employs the body in any inquiry, and makes use of sight or hearing, or any other sense- for inquiry with the body means inquiry of the sense- she is dragged away by it to the things which never remain the same, and wanders about blindly, and becomes confused and dizzy, like a drunken man, from dealing with things that are ever changing?…But when she investigates any question by herself, she goes away to the pure, and eternal, and immortal, and unchangeable, to which she is akin, and so she comes to be ever with it, as soon as she is by herself, and can be so; and then she rests from her wanderings and dwells with it unchangingly, for she is dealing with what is unchanging. And is not this state of the soul called wisdom?