Plato

See also Socrates

Apology

• Defence against charges against them
• Promote study under the earth and sky
• Corrupt youth use of Athens → promote new gods (last for 1 day)

Poisons

• Contrary to the charges → never takes money for instruction
  • Available to anyone without any fees → Socrates didn’t teach, just talk in public
  • Converse with knowledgable → these ppl never shares their wisdom
  • Socrates go after people?
    • Need to embarrass them?
    • Oracle at Delphi → Anyone wiser than Socrates?
      • No one is wiser than Socrates
    • Socrates doesn’t feel wise?
      • Enquire about what wisdom is?
    • Enquire knowledgable → bored
    • Enquire poets → Wisdom doesn’t come from poets (poets inspired from wisdom of the god)
    • Enquire technicians → not the right source of knowledge for wisdom
      • Craftman == incapable of explain why he does what he does ⇒ verbal explanation is irrelevant

Wisdom can be used both for good and bad

    Wisdom is a penetrate into the goods, not the bad

Oracle at Delphi → reputation for enigma (ironic, play with words)

Oracle could mock humanity

    No one is wiser than Socrates

• He is the wisest
• No one is wise (Socrates is as wise, and he knows he is not wise → no hope)
• He is the wisest because he knows he is not wisest

He does not know anything fine and good

Socrates posses no expertise in making goodness

Socrates: Mission to relentless for people to confront them for their ignorance, takes care of your soul

Convicted by the stupidity of them all

Dialog

Dikasts → Arguments:

• Behaviour is not subversive, contrary to their beliefs, and doesn’t harm the city
• Actions are sanctified by the gods → You don’t understand anything
• Follow his conscience rather than follow their democracy
• Contempt towards democracy, Mockery
• Democracy is a childish form of government

My trial will be equivalent to a doctor being prosecuted by a pastry-cook before a jury of children

Context of the trial

• Athens → democracy from 508 to 322 BCE
• Peloponnesian War → Sparta defats Athens
• Alkibiades: friend of Socrates
  • Dissolute
  • Conflicted about this character
    • Admire his charm, leadership quality
    • Poty, aristocratic → fear from his ambition
    • Fear from friends of Alkibiades
    • His family is from Spartan
    • Charges for treason → Sentenced to death → Resurface in Spartan → democracy is corrupted
  • Assassination attempted
  • Return to Athens as a hero
  • 404 → Athens accepted terms to surrender to Spartan
  • Assassinated while traveling

→ probable enemy of Democracy (Socrates) → look for someone to blame

• Because he was a friend of Alkibiades → find scapegoat for a failing democracy

Among philoshophers, poets to be contempted with Athens democracy:

• Masses are childish, fickle, easily misled
• Unnatural, tyranny of the weak over the strong
• Confuses freedom with lack of restraint, favors flatterers
• Inefficient

Government should be efficient → chose the best person to govern

Socratic rules would not be Aristocrat, rather experts, masters acquired by rulership. Philosophical rulers →

• Crucial to make them wise and knowledgable
• Establish education → reason well and follow reasons

Nietzsche → problems with Socrates

• Reasoned and consciously sound
• Un-examined mind is not worth living?

What makes wisdom so good?

Socratic Idea of Good

Something is good when it contributes to the full flourishing of a human being in all our powers and faculties for the natural duration of life.

Know how to use all things in a way it tends good

What is not good might not be wise?

→ really cares about Athens, wisdom, then why not participate and join in debates?

• Afraid participating in this democracy?
  • Heard this voice → never tells him what to do, speak against things from what he is considering doing
  • Turned him away from doing wrong things
  • Too honest to survive if occupied with justice
  • Can’t serve justice with service
  • Man whose serve justice must live a private not public life

→ Never does the voice tells him to defence himself → Thought about fleeing → Voice told him not to → What happens after trial may be not a bad thing → Death is not a bad thing

→ Socrates is unmoved after receiving death

You too must be a good hope in place of death. A good man cannot be harmed

What you think to harm me harms you a lot more

He knows there is a life after death ?

Divine mission: encourage Athenians in self-reflection for good moral life

Difference

• Gods are perfectly just and follow moral standard, whereas everyone else (Holmer show us Gods brought up death) doesn’t
• Poets: Gods bring meaningless suffering to people

→ Socrates thinks this is wrong, and poets should be defamed by not worshipping gods

Virtuous

• masculine

• Conventionally good, knowledge within wisdom are good only if it is used wisely

What does wisdom do for us?

• Knowledge of the goods, and the power that comes with it
• Knowing the good universally and philosophically, and from that

A good person cannot be harmed The unexamined life is not worth living Doing wrong is worse than suffering wrong Riches and power contribute nothing to happiness. Only wisdom and virtue matter, and wisdom is the ultimate virtue

Phaedo

by Plato a month later, Socrates’ in jail, waiting for his execution

Tries to write poetry

• Write to gods of Apollo (Oracle at Delphi)
• fables of issa
• Recurring dream accross his life → ends with him hearing a voice: Socrates, practice art

last day of life jurors thinks death is the worst harm, yet Socrates said:

That might be true for somebody. Philosophers should fear death less than anyone else Philosophy is a apparition of practice of death

What is death?

• Turning away images of body, to intellectual form of ideas
• Free their souls from the confusion of the mind
• Body is an obstacle to knowledge
• Truth is known by intellect, reasoning → involves the best part of the body, ignoring all sense

The body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom. As long as we have a body and our soul is fused with such an evil and well shall never adequately attain what we want, which truth.

If we are ever to have pure knowledge, we must escape from the body and observe things in themselves with the soul by itself. It seems likely that we shall attain. wisdom only when we are dead (65d-66e)

Explains the value of philosophy as a preparation of death free of deception, sensory of self → attain the wisdom that wait us from the other side Is there another side?

Last hour:

Prove: The soul cannot die.

• Contrived and unconvincing
• Life after death?

Arguments:

1. Arguments of survival
   1. All things come into being from their opposite Living come from the dead, and the dead comes from the living
   • To have come from the dead the soul
2. 1. Understanding of perfection is independent of sense experience
      1. A priori knowledge: independent of experience
      2. A posterior knowledge: depends on experience
   2. To have knowledge independently of experience → the soul must have been alive prior to bodily life → will it survive death?
   3. Yes, because a soul that exists before birth must come from something dead → association with a living body is not essential to a soul Do not require a living body to be a living soul
3. Against soul scattering
   • Soul can dissolve and scatter must be composite → What is composite changes, what is simple does not change
   • Ideas like Equality or Justice do not change → Ideas are simple, not composite (simple = non-composite)
   • Understanding ideas is a pure power of mind and does not depend on the body
   • Since ideas are simple → soul that understands them must also be simple
   • So a soul does not consist of parts, is indivisible, and therefore cannot change
   • So death cannot change the soul
4. 1. Soul brings life to the body → makes body a live, in the way that the form of the even make six, for of Hot make fire hot
   2. The idea of Even cannot become odd, the idea of the hot cannot become cold.

Pythagorean: Soul is more than all of what makes a body → Soul is a being in its own right, separate entity, detachable from body, which makes the body alive

No one does evil without knowing that they are doing evil

⇒ Conclude: Cannot harm a good man, cannot kill a soul, tranquil

I shall no longer with you, offer his cup of poison → reminds what is important

Reserve to Crito:

• We owe a cock to a Symposium. Make the offering and do not forgive

→ cure to a disease, from his body. Cannot trust from the world. It lacks things from what we need → The nether is much better

Plato: Such was the end of the comrade. The men who does he knows

Conquer the west → Western civilisation places a lot of sign in faith

Symposium

some time after Socrates’ death Agathon, a poet of tragedies, is the host

Soul is an abstraction from empirical knowledge.

Alkibiades, of Scocrates:

This utterly unnatural, this truly extraordinary man … this hopelessly arrogant, this unbelievably insolent man … [of] amazing arrogance and pride … he unique

• Seduction: is a game wrt Socrates

→ Socrates life is one big game of irony

Alkibiades: Seduction for a trade

• invites Socrates to wrestle in the gym ⇐ doesn’t work
• drunk (no one has seen him drunk). Lies down → makes move → nothing

Finding yourself falling in love with Socrates

• Pretends to fall in love → others will fall in love with him

Ordinary irony: False ⇒ to implies the opposite

Socratic irony: Both is and is not seriously meant ⇒ True in one way, false in another

to Euthyphro: You think that your knowledge of the divine, and of piety and impiety, is so accurate that … you have no fear of having acted impiously in bringing your father to trial

• Knowledge of divine is false ⇒ false

⇒ Euthyphro: self-righteous fouls doesn’t understand anything

Angers when seeing Socrates falling for someone else.

Future replicates the past. Love must be more than intense alliances from others.

Socrates can’t teach anybody anything that they don’t already know

• Alkibiades is so rough beneath the smooth surface → not interesting to bring in as disciple
• Alkibiades knows himself too much to love, to be drawn to Socrates
• Maybe Alkibiades can be redeemed by philosophers

Republic

1. Metaphysics: philosophical theory of being

To be is to be an idea.

Idea means ideal form, means it is perfect, doesn’t know by the triad or the body

Idea is intelligible (things grasped by intellect), not sensible (sense-perceptible things) being.

True reality is world of ideas and immaterial, changeless, ethereal, fully rational.

Opinions without knowledge are shameful and ugly things.

Sounds are copy of ideas ← bad

Idea of good is the idea to make things to be good.

1. Idea of good is the most important thing that everyone know
   • By conforming this, everything else would be useful and beneficient
   • Don’t know the idea of good = everything else is useless

Obtain knowledge of good is the foundation of Platonic philosophy

Merely believed to be true: Everyone wants what is good

Every souls persue the goods and do what it is good

Can’t understand our own goods without knowing how our own goods integrate with the best self of everything.

→ makes people the best of what they can be.

Satisfied with opinion where knowledge is out there to be found?

Opinion: doxa Knowledge: episteme Understanding: nous

• Belief is liable to error, knowledge is not. • Belief can be changed by persuasion, knowledge cannot be. • Belief does not bring understanding, knowledge does. • True belief, right opinion, is still essentially belief or opinion, and cannot be knowledge since its truth is accidental. • Opinion is shameful because it is not a passive thing that innocently occurs to a person.

Sun: Visible Things : Sight

Idea of good stands to intelligible things as intelligible things stand to understanding

Good illuminate to us understanding

• Cause of beings for ideas
• Cause for knowledge

Virtually all ideas (white light is virtually all colors)

⇒ Makes all minds to be true and understanding.

To understand is to focus intellect on the form, idea (stare into the sun and not be blinded)

Understand an idea is understand what true being is.

Knowledge knows what is is and must be it is

Criterion of knowledge:

• Infallibility, the impossibility of error

Understanding (nous) ⇒ Philosophy Beauty, justice are entities

Thought (dianoia) ⇒ Science

• Requires some intellectual understanding → thoughts
• Hypothesis: first principle of science yet stayed unexplained

Perception (aesthesis) ⇒ Opinion

How do we understand philosophy?

Dialetic

Inquiry that systematically attempts to grasp with respect to each thing itself what they being of it is ( that is, the idea)

Does away with presuppositions. It overcomes everything hypothetical in thought and leads to presuppositionless knowledge.