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Not to dispute Dr. Palmer's account, but Socrates' main argument at his trial was that he was not trying to impose knowledge on the citizens of Athens. Instead — to use Socrates' analogy — he was like a horse-fly, biting at their presumptions and assumptions and forcing them out of the complacent drowsiness of mere 'knowledge' into philosophical engagement ...
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Socrates might not have ever claimed this.
See here. An example of what he did say is:
I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than ...
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Whether Plato's character of Socrates or Plato himself believed in a God or many Gods is not perfectly clear. Additionally, we can't ascribe any sort of belief to the historical Socrates; we just don't know enough about his life that doesn't come from Plato or Xenophon. For the rest of this answer I'll say "Socrates" instead of "Plato's ...
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Both of the answers are correct to point out that the dialogues are fictitious. It is extremely unlikely any section of any length is a transcript of an actual conversation between Socrates and anyone.
This, however, should not surprise us because the idea of making dialogue in a written work a transcript is a modern concept. No one would have done so until ...
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In several places, most notably the discussion of the "Allegory of the Cave" in The Republic, Plato's Socrates identifies the Ideal of the Good as the singular source of all good things in the universe. Plato's followers, the Neoplatonists, further identified this Idea of the Good with God, a perspective that was very influential on early ...
answered Oct 9 '15 at 19:53
Chris Sunami supports Monica
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I believe the Nietzsche's passage referred to is this one:
"Socrates' decadence is suggested not only by the admitted wantonness and anarchy of his instincts, but also by the hypertrophy of the logical faculty and that barbed malice which distinguishes him. Nor should we forget those auditory hallucinations which, as "the daimonion of Socrates," have been ...
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SOCRATES VERSUS BUDDHA ON THE SOUL
If Buddhism denies the existence of any continuing self or soul, this appears to conflict with Socrates' view of a continuing soul which is freed and released from the regions of the earth as from a prison. The soul continues to exist, Socrates says, but in radically different conditions. For Buddhism there is no soul to ...
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Your understanding of Euthyphro sounds inverted. At the time, the idea that "good" was just a name for what the gods approve of was a commonplace. Plato's goal here, in fact, is to replace the arbitrary and often contradictory morality of Greek mythology with a more perfect, abstract, consistent and eternal philosophical notion of "good" ...
answered Apr 14 at 14:31
Chris Sunami supports Monica
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The answer lies in the Phaedo, not much after the passage on suicide, to which you referred. The issue of suicide arises in the context of the question, put to Socrates, why he seemed to favor death, rather than struggling to avoid it. And a part of his answer was, that the knowledge which the philosopher seeks all his life, seems to await him after death. ...
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You stumbled over the Socratic paradox.
It is a classical example of the Dunning–Kruger effect: You need a certain minimal competence to begin to perceive your own degree of incompetence.
Because reality is arguably infinitely complex chances are that any increase in competence only increases the insight into the vastness of our incompetence. Socrates, ...
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There's at least two reasons to suggest that Socrates never said this (though one of the reasons makes it so that it's unlikely one could definitively say this).
Reason #1: Socrates did not write anything down. What we have where Socrates speaks are three sources: (1) The Clouds by Aristophanes (wiki), the writings of Plato, and the writings of Xenephon (...
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As far as I know Plato's dialogues are fictitious.
E.g., Parmenides died at about 460 BCE in the South of Italy, while Socrates was born at 470 BCE in Athens. Hence the meeting of Parmenides with a young Socrates, teaching Plato's theory of forms, cannot be historical.
Even when the dialogues are fictitious, some of the interlocutors in Plato's dialogues ...
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You said "With these two comments in mind, could we infer that Socrates fears Euthyphro?"
By just taking two comments from such a large conversation, you are going to conclude somethings which may be true (based on just these 2 comments) but pointless/worthless.
By the way, I have the conversation in ancient Greeks language (https://repository.edulll.gr/...
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The Platonic Socrates did not claim that he knew nothing.
When asked by Chaerephon whether there were any wiser than Socrates, the Delphic Oracle replied that there was no one wiser (Apology, 21A). This puzzled Socrates, who thought he had no wisdom at all. He questioned the reputedly wise, then the poets, then the craftsmen or artisans. He concluded, not ...
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I'm put in mind of Socrates' speech in the Symposium, 201d- 212c, expressed as the report of a discourse of Diotima, the wise woman from Mantinea. I summarise from W.R.M. Lamb, Symposium, Loeb: Harvard & London, 1961: 172-209.
To improve the soul, Diotima says, it is perfectly correct, indeed necessary, in early life to be acutely aware of bodily beauty ...
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One of the key features when teaching the Apology (which many philosophers don't teach in intro courses, because it's somewhat sparse on arguments) is basically whether Socrates is defending himself in full earnest or toying (perhaps trolling) the Athenians who are putting him on trial.
There are several features of this toying:
The list of people Socrates ...
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Socrates claims to be rewarded with free feeding at the Prytaneum because he has served well the State by teaching. A Socratic irony.
The Prytaneion was a building on the Acropolis of Athens. {...}
It was dedicated to Athena Polias and served as Archives. Here dined ambassadors and official people, and Αείσιτοι (aeisitoi - permanent feeding) who were ...
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Socrates' personality was in some ways closely connected to his philosophical outlook. He was remarkable for the absolute command he maintained over his emotions and his apparent indifference to physical hardships. Corresponding to these personal qualities was his commitment to the doctrine that reason, properly cultivated, can and ought to be the all-...
answered Jun 14 '14 at 5:10
musingsofacigarettesmokingman
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Are people inherently good according to Plato?
This may be a delicate question. On the one hand, Plato's Socrates asserts, in the Phaedo, concerning the misanthropist (hater of people), that only few people are genuinely good or evil.
Is it not obvious that such an one having to deal with other men, was clearly without any experience of human nature; for ...
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There's a lot of interesting features to the question.
First, you need to consider how serious Socrates is being vs. how much of a joke he's making of the whole thing. Second, it's important to realize "Socrates" is a character Plato is using and the Apology is largely agreed to not be a factual representation of what's going on (See What did Socrates mean ...
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According to reference of Phaedo's recording of Socrates here:
Socrates concludes that the soul of the virtuous man is immortal, and the course of its passing into the underworld is determined by the way he lived his life. The philosopher, and indeed any man similarly virtuous, in neither fearing death, nor cherishing corporeal life as something idyllic, ...
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This is similar to Descartes' "experiment" where he proposes to doubt everything. In the beginning of Pensées, he realizes that there is one thing he cannot doubt: his own existence. Hence "cogito ergo sum".
It is a strategy of self-examination, not an assertion.
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From what I understand, there is actually a lot of disagreement about the chronology of the dialogues. After a bit of searching, I did come up with this link that lists some the dialogues sorted chronologically. Hope it helps.
Plato's Dialogues
EDIT
The above link lists them, as Keshav Srinivasan pointed out, in order of writing. The below is one person's ...
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From Wikipedia:
Socrates initially earned his living as a master stonecutter... Several of Plato's dialogues refer to Socrates' military service.... In 406, he was a member of the Boule [group of governing aristocrats].
Socrates repeatedly describes himself as being poor, for example in the Apology:
if I had been like other men, I should not have ...
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Any answer about Socrates faces the difficulty that we do not have any texts written by Socrates but only texts written about Socrates.
Texts about Socrates have been written by Plato, by Aristophanes and by Xenophon.
The Socrates from Plato's late dialogues is certainly a fiction of Plato. While the Socrates of the early dialogues - Crito, Phaedo - and in ...
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In ancient Athens, once a person was convicted of a crime, the prosecutor and the defendant both had the opportunity to propose a just sentence, with the jury to vote on which to take. In theory, the prosecutor would not propose a sentence too harsh, and the defendant would not propose a sentence too light, because of the danger of pushing the jury towards ...
answered Oct 6 '15 at 14:31
Chris Sunami supports Monica
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I would agree that this argument hinges on whether something is pious because it is loved by the gods vs. something is loved by the gods because it is pious.
Your wording of P, Q, and R sound a little funny to me, but my copy of the text is in my office. So it's possible the original is worded similarly.
I see the structure as follows:
Socrates asks for a ...
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The passage quoted in the question is from Plato's Phaedo 74b.
In the passage around, Socrates aims at the difference between two concrete things, which are equal, on one hand, and on the other hand the abstract idea of equality. He gives an example: Two pieces of wood may seem equal. But in order to recognize that they are are equal, we must have formed ...
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