Socrates and Plato: Philosophy in Ancient Greece
Socrates and Plato
1. Historical Context
1.1. Triumph of the Democratic City-State
- Civil strife and revolution: democratic constitution of Cleisthenes, as amended by the revolution of Ephialtes: political participation of all citizens in city government.
- Three political parties: reactionary, Knights of Truth and Order, moderated by Socrates and Plato; and radical democratic workers. Government party of the proletariat led by Pericles.
- After the medical war (victory of the Greeks led by Athens over the Persian Empire), in the Peloponnesian War, Sparta defeated Athens, beginning its decline. Government of the Thirty Tyrants, with a harsh persecution of citizens.
1.2. Greek Enlightenment
Cultural splendor (5th century BC) and anthropocentric humanism (man is the focus of art, literature, and philosophy).
- Tragedy is the medium of popular education; it addresses the infighting and political conflicts in society over the polis kinship founded on law.
- Ideal-aesthetic: classic, canon of beauty (harmony and balance); naturalism: natural beauty, the idea of cosmic harmony, order, and beauty, is in line with morality based on moderation and balance, the virtue of prudence.
- Greek Enlightenment: rationalism, universal search for truth and objectivity. Popular education and critical philosophy, skeptical doubt, and cultural relativism.
1.3. The Sophists
1.3.1. Crisis of Philosophy
Due to the diversity of conflicting and irreconcilable systems:
- Discredited cosmology cannot know the essence of reality (skepticism); differences in the moral derived classes.
- The truth depends on the interests of each, depending on your point of view, and is subjective (relativism).
1.3.2. Investigation of Man
As a subject of knowledge, it is part of the observation of the variety of cultures and customs, to get to the convention: the social organization is the result of an agreement between citizens and not derived from divine law.
1.3.3. Practical Purposes
Training and education; they teach the art of convincing (rhetoric, reasoning not shown) for political purposes, are paid a salary, and continue to defend private interests of political parties: Democratic, Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things” (relativism), and aristocratic-Gorgias: “Nothing exists; if it did, we could not know it; if we could know it, we could not communicate it” (skepticism).
2. Socrates: Overcoming the Sophists
2.1. Objective Truth
Seeks to find objective truth with universal validity, to find bases for agreement among citizens, morals, and the law derived from human nature (not conventional), conducted as a social being: human beings are moral and political.
2.2. Maieutics
(Art of midwives: Helping birth ideas), find the common sense of citizens and the knowledge of objective truth, based on the absence of prejudice: criticism of ignorance expressed by irony and self-recognition of own ignorance (“I only know that I know nothing”).
2.3. Public Debate
The truth appears in the public debate on the clash of different perspectives on reality; the reason is the synthesis of opposing ideas (dialectic) and rational inductive method, asking the different views to find the definition (universal concept) and to develop the argument logic (deduction).
2.4. Moral Intellectualism
Practical wisdom is the foundation of the good life and moral conduct that leads to happiness; every human being is moral, like the good (evil is ignorance), but you have to know what you want (know thyself); virtue is the domain of the very nature that allows us to achieve our goals.
2.5. Freedom and Civic Duty
Freedom consists in fulfilling civic duty for the public good (equivalence between the public good and private good), acceptance of the death sentence to follow the laws of the city; the main virtue is righteousness (virtue = happiness = justice).
3. Plato: The Dialogues
3.1. Historical Significance
- Plato raises the fundamental problems that must be solved by rational criticism philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, methodology).
- Science: origin of the first science: to discover the rational order underlying phenomena (Timaeus, the world is an imperfect material copy from the world of ideas). Eudoxus of Cnidus, the first scientific model of astronomy, egocentric system. Aristotle develops biology and physics.
- Aesthetics: formulation of the classical ideal of natural harmony, art as imitation of nature, beauty awakens the love that leads to truth and goodness.
- Theology: precursor of Christianity, influence on Augustine, the divine mind which contains the plans of creation is the world of ideas.
3.2. Summaries of Previous Philosophy
- Influence of the mainstream of the pre-Socratic philosophy: Heraclitus (the sensible world is in perpetual change, nothing is, the sensible world is not), Parmenides (equivalence of thinking and being, the truth is logical), Pythagoras (numbers are the essence of reality, the importance of mathematics), Anaxagoras (the ‘nous’, the transcendent intelligence governing the universe).
- Starting-point in the teaching of Socrates: rational argument, objectivity of truth, innate ideas, moral intellectualism, freedom, and civic virtue.
3.3. Epistemology, Theory of Ideas
The sensible world is mere appearance, sensations are unreal shadows; the true reality is that ideas are immutable, eternal, spiritual, transcendent.
- Innate ideas: knowing is remembering (recollection) of the material world shapes the ideas remind soul ascension process of the soul to the world of ideas governed by the idea of property (Republic, the myth of the cave).
- Forms of knowledge: it is sensible opinion, doxa, (uncertain knowledge) that can be imagination (fantasy) and perception (science), the intellectual is to know the way, episteme, which can be mathematical (analysis) and dialectical (synthesis).
- The world of ideas is hierarchical and is a system of necessary relations (deductive). At the top is the idea of property, or Unit.
3.4. Metaphysics
The true reality is in the ideas of material objects involved in the existence of ideas, because they constitute its formal essence (immanence), or imitate the ideas, are an imperfect copy (transcendence), the demiurge (creator) models the matter and makes the cosmos looking at ideas (like a craftsman who works a material to make a beautiful object).
3.5. Anthropology
The human being is composed of three souls (winged chariot metaphor): the rational soul is immortal, belongs to the world of ideas, and is imprisoned in the material body (the charioteer); this has an animal soul or irascible, forming want (horse mint), and another soul concupiscible or plant that produces the desire (the wrong horse) corresponding virtues: prudence, fortitude, and temperance; the first should rule the other two as the charioteer to the horses.
- Rational souls belong to the world of ideas and are eternal but are thrown in prison of the body; transmigration of souls are reincarnated in material bodies while purified to return to the world of ideas.
3.6. Morals and Politics
- Man is sociable: the importance of social relations based on justice, ‘it is most unfortunate that commits injustice which have’, justice is a moral virtue that keeps the balance between the various parts of the human personality and applies to dealings with other human beings: ‘The tyrant is himself, is also with other tyrant.’
- Functional division of labor in the city-state, every citizen does his duty to cooperate with the common good, which is the good of each and every one (private good = public good), education of citizens in social life.
- The Republic is the perfect state (utopia) has three classes (rulers philosophers, warriors, and producers) that correspond to the three human souls and their virtues. The personality structure is identical to the social structure.
- The failure of utopia takes to develop laws, imperfect state under the rule of law, where every citizen, including the leader, must submit to the law.