Quick Bites: Socrates & Plato

Meet Plato.
Who's that?

So you've never heard of Plato? Don't fret. Surely you've used the term, 'platonic'? You've guessed it. The term, Platonic, comes from Plato (No, I won't go into details why...at least not now.)

Did you know that Plato (pictured above) was a disciple of Socrates, and was in turn, mentor to Aristotle? (Huh? Who? Who? And who??)

Socrates was credited as the most noble and wisest Athenian who have ever lived. He saw himself as a philosopher -- as a lover of wisdom. It had been said that he was perhaps more in love with the study of philosophy, than he was with his family. One of his many invaluable contributions to Western Thought would be the Socratic Method of Inquiry.

Adapted and Excerpted from Wikipedia:

To illustrate the use of the Socratic method; a series of questions are posed to help a person or group to determine their underlying beliefs and the extent of their knowledge. The Socratic method is a negative method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those which lead to contradictions. It was designed to force one to examine one's own beliefs and the validity of such beliefs.

Our knowledge of Socrates comes from numerous dialogues which Plato wrote. The style of the Plato's dialogue is important – it is the Socratic style that he employs throughout. A Socratic dialogue takes the form of question-answer, question-answer, question-answer. It is a dialectical style as well. Socrates would argue both sides of a question in order to arrive at a conclusion. Then that conclusion is argued against another assumption and so on. (Which can be annoying at times!)

Socrates did not give his students answers--instead he posed them questions in response to their questions. He sought to teach (we use the term 'facilitate' today) truth because he believed that everyone could "pull" truth out of their own minds.

Plato's most famous work, The Republic, discusses a number of topics including the nature of justice, statesmanship, ethics and the nature of politics. In The Republic, Plato asks what is knowledge? what is illusion? what is reality? how do we know? what makes a thing, a thing? what can we know?

(These are epistemological questions – that is, they are questions about knowledge itself. He distinguishes between the reality presented to us by our senses – sight, touch, taste, sound and smell – and the essence or Form of that reality.)

In other words, reality is always changing – knowledge of reality is individual, it is particular, it is knowledge only to the individual knower, it is not universal.

(This is probably a little confusing for you now...but keep on reading. It'll come to you in a while's time...maybe 6 or 7 weeks later.)

We'll be covering Plato's Timaeus in Week 10 after the term break.

In the Timaeus, Plato presents an elaborately wrought account of the formation of the universe. Plato is deeply impressed with the order and beauty he observes in the universe, and his project in the dialogue is to explain that order and beauty. The universe, he proposes, is the product of rational, purposive, and beneficent agency.

Yeah...we'll leave that for Week 10.