Honors World Studies Mrs. Steinke

 Socrates  Initially people thought Socrates was a sophist, but in fact he was their bitterest opponent.

 Socrates  He wrote nothing himself (or if he did, none of it survived). But we get a very clear picture of what he was about from his students like Plato.

 Socrates  Shabbily dressed, always barefoot, physically tough, and with a record of courage in battle, he loved to spend his days arguing in the market- place.

 Socrates  With Socrates there is a shift away from the scientific querying we have seen so far to the problem of Ethics.

  Remember ethics? Socrates The study of good and evil, right and wrong, rules and virtues, character and vice, success and happiness.

  Business ethics: What is okay to do?  Legal ethics: Who is it okay to sue?  Medical ethics: When is it okay to clone?  Techno ethics: Is it okay to tap a phone? Socrates

  He was deeply concerned with morality

 Socrates  He was deeply concerned with discovering the just, the true and the good.

 Socrates  For Socrates, philosophy wasn’t a profession, as it was with the sophists, but a way of life.

 Socrates  When the Oracle at Delphi said “None is wiser than Socrates” he chose to interpret this as “He is wisest among men who sees, like Socrates, that his wisdom is paltry.”

 Socrates  He preferred to see himself as a gadfly, stirring up the lazy.

 Socrates  Socrates argued that what makes a man sin is lack of knowledge. If only he knew he would not sin.

 Socrates  He believed knowledge is virtue. The one overriding cause of evil was ignorance. This is a very un-christian ethical stance.

 Socrates  Socrates method of enquiry was one of question and answer. He saw himself as a midwife to the truth, which he could draw logically, and often ironically, little by little from his opponent.

 Socrates  This is called dialectic… the tension that exists between two conflicting or interacting forces, elements, or ideas.

 Socrates  It is an investigation of the truth through discussion, or the art of investigating truths through discussion.

 Socrates  The aim of Socrates’ dialectic and irony was to expose false claims to wisdom and to move forward towards a knowledge of man’s own nature.

 Socrates  Socrates was not cynical about the possibility of truth but was convinced it could only be achieved through hard work.

  When Socrates asked a question like “What is justice?” he was not asking for a mere verbal definition. The fact that we apply the word “just” to all sorts of different people, decisions, laws and sets of arrangements meant, he believed, that there was something common to them, a common property called “justice” which they all shared; and it was the character of this common property that he was trying to uncover. Socrates

  In other words, he believed that something exists called “justice,” and that its existence is real, although not material, perhaps some sort of essence; and that he was trying to discover the nature of this abstract reality.

 Socrates  The very nature of what Socrates did made him a disruptive and subversive influence. He was teaching people to question everything, and he was exposing the ignorance of individuals in power and authority.

 Socrates  He believes that to a man who preserves his integrity no real, long term harm can ever come to him. Bad things happen, but it is just chance…provided your soul remains untouched, your misfortunes will be comparatively trivial.

 Socrates  He believes that it does a person far, far less harm to suffer injustice than to commit it. We should pity the perpetrator of injustice, not the victim of injustice.

 Socrates  Socrates was the first to teach the priority of personal integrity in terms of a person’s duty to himself, and not to the gods, or the law, or any other authorities.

 Socrates  This belief had incalculable influence through the ages. Not only was he willing to die at the hands of the law rather than give up his beliefs, he actually chose to do so, when he could have escaped, he chose not to.

 Socrates  Socrates also did more than any other to establish the principle that everything must be open to question—there can be no cut and dried answers, because answers, like everything else, are themselves open to question.