So let's talk about Socrates like Yeshua suggested.
Socrates was the Tupac of ancient Greece. He was popular, many liked him, and the authorities disliked him.
There were outstanding Greek philosophers before him, for instance Pythagoras and Heraclitus. They are called the pre-Socratic philosophers. If they can be said to have one thing in common it was an attempt to find universal principles which would explain the whole of nature. So they were really concerned with what we call science more than with philosophy, though they hadn’t developed the scientific method of experimentation so all they did was think about scientific matters. Socrates was in conscious rebellion against them. Just listen to his classic, "I Hit 'Em Up:" "You know who the realist is." "Y'all ni**as ain't even on my level." "Pythagoras weaker than a f**kin' block."
Anyway, he maintained that what we most need to learn is not how nature works but how we ourselves ought to live, and therefore that what we need to consider first and foremost are moral questions.
He didn't write anything as far as we know. He did all his teaching by mouth (like a rapper). I think that like Tupac, Socrates' death in 399 BC must have been a traumatic event for a lot of people. Socrates had been a spell-binding presence around Athens for many many years, much loved, much hated. He had even been caricatured on the comic stage, at a public festival, in front of the whole populace of Athens. Then suddenly the familiar figure is not there any more. The reason he's not there is that he has been condemned to death on a charge of impiety and corrupting the youth (gangsta rap). He had had a lot of devoted followers and some of them, amongst them Plato, began writing Socratic dialogues: philosophical conversations in which Socrates takes the lead. It must have been like all the unreleased Pac songs that came out after his death, like saying, "Look, he's not gone after all. You can't silence him."
Every month a new Socrates dialogue drops and gets passed around the city. Look, he's still here, still asking those awkward questions, still tripping you up with his arguments. Staring at the world through his rear view. And of course these Socratic dialogues were also defending his reputation and showing that he had been unjustly condemned.
Plato was thirty-one when Socrates died, and lived to be eighty-one. All his life he wrote dialogues with Socrates as the main character. It's from his writings that most of our knowledge of Socrates comes from. To keep alive the Socratic spirit for Plato meant to go on doing philosophy in the way that Socrates had done it. His early dialogues depict Socrates discussing the sorts of questions he was interested in, very largely moral questions. But then, since to do philosophy in the Socratic way means to do it by thinking philosophically, the process gradually led Plato to develop his own ideas. So the later dialogues give us Plato's ideas through the mouth of Socrates, but only if he can plausibly present them as the outgrowth of thinking about Socrates’ ideas.
The early dialogues have a certain characteristic pattern. Socrates finds himself talking to someone who takes it for granted that he knows the meaning of a very familiar term, something like “friendship” or “courage”; and by simply quizzing him, interrogating him, submitting him to what has become known as “Socratic questioning,” Socrates shows this person, and, even more importantly, the onlookers, that they do not at all have a clear grasp of the concept which they thought they had.
And these works are still widely used to teach philosophy to people who want to know something about it. You start with a familiar and important concept, and you get people to realize that there are problems in that concept. They try to think about it; they produce an answer. Socrates shows the inadequacy of the answer. You end up not with a firm answer, but with a much better grasp of the problem than you did before.
Socrates keeps saying that he has no positive doctrines to teach—that all he is doing is asking questions. Plato, I think, would be very firmly insistent that even if he did know the answers, if he told us them they wouldn’t do us any good. I mean, it’s in the nature of these questions that you have to puzzle them out for yourself. An answer is worth nothing unless it has come through your own thinking. And that’s why these dialogues are so successful as instruments for drawing you into philosophy. You get drawn into the problem; you get shown common mistakes and dead ends in reasoning, and you’re left still wanting the answer and feeling that perhaps you can contribute.
I recommend everyone read some of these dialogues. Most important ones are the Apology, The Crito, the Euthyphro, the Laches, the Charmides, the Protagoras and the Gorgias. Oh, and Hail Mary.
Socrates was the Tupac of ancient Greece. He was popular, many liked him, and the authorities disliked him.
There were outstanding Greek philosophers before him, for instance Pythagoras and Heraclitus. They are called the pre-Socratic philosophers. If they can be said to have one thing in common it was an attempt to find universal principles which would explain the whole of nature. So they were really concerned with what we call science more than with philosophy, though they hadn’t developed the scientific method of experimentation so all they did was think about scientific matters. Socrates was in conscious rebellion against them. Just listen to his classic, "I Hit 'Em Up:" "You know who the realist is." "Y'all ni**as ain't even on my level." "Pythagoras weaker than a f**kin' block."
Anyway, he maintained that what we most need to learn is not how nature works but how we ourselves ought to live, and therefore that what we need to consider first and foremost are moral questions.
He didn't write anything as far as we know. He did all his teaching by mouth (like a rapper). I think that like Tupac, Socrates' death in 399 BC must have been a traumatic event for a lot of people. Socrates had been a spell-binding presence around Athens for many many years, much loved, much hated. He had even been caricatured on the comic stage, at a public festival, in front of the whole populace of Athens. Then suddenly the familiar figure is not there any more. The reason he's not there is that he has been condemned to death on a charge of impiety and corrupting the youth (gangsta rap). He had had a lot of devoted followers and some of them, amongst them Plato, began writing Socratic dialogues: philosophical conversations in which Socrates takes the lead. It must have been like all the unreleased Pac songs that came out after his death, like saying, "Look, he's not gone after all. You can't silence him."
Every month a new Socrates dialogue drops and gets passed around the city. Look, he's still here, still asking those awkward questions, still tripping you up with his arguments. Staring at the world through his rear view. And of course these Socratic dialogues were also defending his reputation and showing that he had been unjustly condemned.
Plato was thirty-one when Socrates died, and lived to be eighty-one. All his life he wrote dialogues with Socrates as the main character. It's from his writings that most of our knowledge of Socrates comes from. To keep alive the Socratic spirit for Plato meant to go on doing philosophy in the way that Socrates had done it. His early dialogues depict Socrates discussing the sorts of questions he was interested in, very largely moral questions. But then, since to do philosophy in the Socratic way means to do it by thinking philosophically, the process gradually led Plato to develop his own ideas. So the later dialogues give us Plato's ideas through the mouth of Socrates, but only if he can plausibly present them as the outgrowth of thinking about Socrates’ ideas.
The early dialogues have a certain characteristic pattern. Socrates finds himself talking to someone who takes it for granted that he knows the meaning of a very familiar term, something like “friendship” or “courage”; and by simply quizzing him, interrogating him, submitting him to what has become known as “Socratic questioning,” Socrates shows this person, and, even more importantly, the onlookers, that they do not at all have a clear grasp of the concept which they thought they had.
And these works are still widely used to teach philosophy to people who want to know something about it. You start with a familiar and important concept, and you get people to realize that there are problems in that concept. They try to think about it; they produce an answer. Socrates shows the inadequacy of the answer. You end up not with a firm answer, but with a much better grasp of the problem than you did before.
Socrates keeps saying that he has no positive doctrines to teach—that all he is doing is asking questions. Plato, I think, would be very firmly insistent that even if he did know the answers, if he told us them they wouldn’t do us any good. I mean, it’s in the nature of these questions that you have to puzzle them out for yourself. An answer is worth nothing unless it has come through your own thinking. And that’s why these dialogues are so successful as instruments for drawing you into philosophy. You get drawn into the problem; you get shown common mistakes and dead ends in reasoning, and you’re left still wanting the answer and feeling that perhaps you can contribute.
I recommend everyone read some of these dialogues. Most important ones are the Apology, The Crito, the Euthyphro, the Laches, the Charmides, the Protagoras and the Gorgias. Oh, and Hail Mary.
