Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

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Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

• Prof.Rose Cherubin
• Department of Philosophy
• George Mason University
• http//www.gmu.edu/courses/phil/ancient/index.htm

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Homegrown Philosophy in Athens

• Socrates (469-399 BCE)
• left no writings, but served as an informal
  teacher and mentor to Plato, Alcibiades, and
  Xenophon, among others (and as a formal and
  informal nuisance to most of Athens)
• Plato (427-347)
• wrote dialogues, of which about 3 dozen survive.
• Many of these feature a character named after and
  based on Socrates.
• Plato founded a school known as the Academy.
• Aristotle (384-322)
• came to Athens in 367 from Stagira in Thrace
  (northern Greece) to study with Plato.
• Some years after Platos death, A. founded his
  own school in Athens, the Lyceum.
• Aristotle wrote treatises on an even wider
  variety of topics than Plato, including physics,
  biology, logic, psychology, ethics, and more.

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Socrates

• What we know of Socrates comes mainly from his
  portrayals in Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes.
• Common elements in all 3 portrayals
• Socrates went around asking people questions in a
  systematic and sustained way
• These questions often had a what-is form (What is
  justice? What is piety? etc.)
• Socrates method involved demonstrating
  contradictions in his respondents claims
• The Athenians responses to the questions showed
  that they did not know what they thought they
  knew
• Socrates was especially committed to showing
  influential people that they were espousing
  contradictory or incoherent things.

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What did Socrates actually say?

• The short answer is We dont know.
• He may well have said that he was wiser than
  other Athenians in so far as he recognized where
  he was ignorant, and tried to remedy these lacks
  and also tried to search out further previously
  unnoticed areas of ignorance.
• He seems to have looked for explanations and
  arguments as the appropriate ways to justify
  actions, suggesting that he was implicitly
  proposing a basis for right and authority other
  than might makes right. This basis would be
  truth, or a commitment to finding it.

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Plato

• All surviving work is in dialogue form.
• Why might Plato have used this form?
• Effects
• Is Plato trying to espouse a certain set of
  ideas, and if so, which characters voice it?
  (Problems beset several proposals.)
• If not, what does the dialogue form give the
  reader?

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Plato

• Well-known and influential ideas
• The Platonic Forms or Ideas
• The Socratic Method (apparently based on
  something Socrates did, but further developed and
  portrayed in writing by Plato)
• platonic love
• intellectual, political, and social equality of
  the sexes

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Plato The Forms

• There is no single theory of Forms or doctrine
  of Forms in Plato.
• The Forms appear in proposals by various
  characters as ways of answering questions such
  as
• What if anything would make knowledge possible?
  (Knowledge of the ultimate nature of things, of
  what we should do, etc.)
• Are there stable underlying recognizable features
  of the universe that make things be the way they
  are?
• And, do they conform to the names we have for
  things, such that what we pick out using language
  are real features of the universe? For example,
  is there a Good Itself or Form of the Good that
  all good things have and that makes them good?

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Plato Socratic Method

• Often what is called the Socratic Method is a
  procedure of questioning to elicit a particular
  answer, a particular bit of content.
• But Plato portrays Socrates as asking questions
  to explore peoples ideas and especially to show
  people the incoherences, contradictions, and
  unwarranted assumptions in their everyday claims
  and beliefs.

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Plato Platonic Love

• The phrase platonic love generally refers to a
  non-physical attraction. This is not exactly what
  Plato meant...
• The phrase seems to derive from a passage in
  Platos Symposium, where Socrates describes how
  one can progress from love of physical beauty
  through love of beautiful deeds and behaviors to
  love of Beauty Itself. But it all starts with,
  and does not necessarily leave behind, physical
  attraction.
• Why then did platonic come to mean non-physical?

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Plato Equality of the Sexes

• In Platos Republic, the character Socrates
  argues that men and women are equally qualified
  and capable to carry out the various functions of
  citizens in a democracy or oligarchy, and that
  they should therefore have the same rights with
  respect to education, voting, property, and the
  like.
• Socrates and his friends are discussing an ideal
  community, so as to gain insight about justice.
  There is no question of such reforms being
  possible in practice (Socrates was executed for
  less).

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Assos, City walls and entry road (4th century
BCE)Aristotle spent time in this area when he
was forced to leave Athens.
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Life of Aristotle

• 384 BCE Aristotle is born at Stagira in Thrace
  (northern part of the Greek peninsula). His
  father was court physician to King Amyntas II of
  Macedonia.
• 367-347 Aristotle studies, and later teaches, at
  Platos Academy in Athens.
• In 347 Plato dies, and there is also
  anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens, so Aristotle
  accepts an invitation to work and teach in Assos
  in Asia Minor. About 344 he moves to nearby
  Mytilene. It is in this period that he seems to
  have begun his empirical research in biology and
  natural history.
• 342 Aristotle is recalled to Macedonia to serve
  as tutor to Alexander, son of King Philip. The
  tutoring seems to have ended in about 340.
• 334 Philip dies Aristotle returns to Athens and
  founds a school, the Lyceum.
• 323 For Alexander-related reasons,
  anti-Macedonian sentiment returns to Athens, and
  Aristotle goes north to Chalcis, where he dies in
  322.

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Aristotles Catfish, Silurus aristotelis

• Aristotle spent much of his time in Asia Minor
  investigating fish. In History of Animals
  621a20-b2, Aristotle reported on the odd behavior
  of a catfish of Asia Minor the male guards the
  young by attacking predators and fishhooks, and
  by disturbing the water and somehow making
  grunting noises. For years it was thought that
  Aristotle was reporting a mere fanciful tale, but
  in the mid-19th century Agassiz discovered that
  there really was such a fish. It was named after
  Aristotle in 1857.

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First Causes and Principles

• Philosophia means love of wisdom. In the
  Metaphysics, Aristotle tries to figure out what
  wisdom might involve. Thus he investigates even
  his own enterprise.
• Aristotle argues that given what is said about
  what is called wisdom, it appears that wisdom
  would be knowledge of first causes and
  principles the most primary or fundamental
  reasons and sources for what is.
• Philosophy investigates first causes and
  principles, but Aristotle does not say that
  anyone has yet found them. In fact, he suggests
  that in our current condition we cant even
  conceive of what it would be like to know first
  causes and principles.

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The Four Causes

• The word Aristotle uses for cause is aitia,
  which literally means that which is responsible
  for something. Another way to understand this
  is that the aitia is the why of something why
  an event happens, or why a thing is the way it
  is.
• Aristotle says that we speak of the why of
  things, that is, of causes, in four basic ways.
  These are sometimes referred to today as
  Aristotles Four Causes, but a better way to
  understand them would be as four kinds of cause.
• The primary discussions of these issues are in
  Metaphysics Book One, Chapter 3 and Physics Book
  Two, Chapters 3 and 7.

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The Four Causes One

• One kind of cause is what Aristotle calls the
  matter (hule). This is that which something is
  made of, its constituent stuff.
• This is sometimes known as the material cause.
• Examples wood is the matter of a wooden table a
  mixture of eggs, flour, and water might be the
  matter of bread.
• For Aristotle, matter is not limited to what we
  would today call material things, i.e. things
  we can sense or detect physically. Aristotle says
  that letters are the matter of syllables (not
  just audible or visible symbols of letters) that
  hypotheses are the matter of conclusions and
  that mathematical objects (for example, ideal
  triangles that are two-dimensional) have
  intelligible matter.

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The Four Causes Two

• Another kind of cause is the source of motion,
  rest, or change what sets off an event, or what
  is responsible for the somethings coming into
  being, perishing, moving, or changing.
• This is sometimes called the efficient cause or
  the moving cause.
• Examples a carpenter, working, is the moving
  cause of a house being constructed. A sculptor,
  working, is the moving cause of a statue. If
  lightning strikes ignite a brush fire, lightning
  was the moving cause of the fire. An adviser,
  Aristotle says, can be the moving cause of a
  course of action, a military campaign, etc.

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The Four Causes Three

• The third kind of cause is what Aristotle
  variously calls the form (eidos) or substance
  (a misleading translation of ousia which means
  being) or pattern (paradeigma) or the account
  of what it is to be something (to ti en einai,
  sometimes translated as essence).
• This is sometimes called the formal cause.
• A wooden table, a metal table, and a stone table
  share a form, that of table, even as they
  have different matter (materials). At the same
  time, it is the form that differentiates a wooden
  table from a wooden chair. Thus the form is part
  of what makes a thing what it is, and so is a
  cause of the things being what it is.
• Non-sensible things have forms too straightness
  is the form of an ideal geometrical line, the
  ratio 21 is the form of an octave, etc.

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The Four Causes Four

• The fourth kind of cause is what Aristotle calls
  that for the sake of which something is, or
  that for the sake of which something is done. He
  sometimes refers to it as the end or goal
  (telos).
• This is sometimes called the final cause.
• Clearly, with many human actions, the end or goal
  is a cause, in the sense that we would not have
  performed the action if we had not had a certain
  goal or purpose in mind.
• Aristotle takes a more controversial position by
  saying that not only deliberate actions but also
  other things have a sake for which they occur
  or exist. Famously, he says that the telos of an
  acorn is an oak.

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Aristotles Ethics

• Aristotle argues that all human actions, arts,
  and investigations aim ultimately at eudaimonia,
  which translates roughly as happiness. A more
  informative translation might be flourishing,
  for Aristotle understands it as living well and
  doing well, and as having a life that was
  desirable and lacking in nothing. Eudaimonia, he
  says, is desired for its own sake.
• He holds that this is only possible within a
  community and that it requires arete. This term
  is usually translated as virtue, but a more
  informative translation would be excellence
  in this case, excellence at what is most deeply
  and characteristically human.

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Ethics

• What does virtue or excellence have to do with
  happiness? Aristotle suggests that the virtues
  are characteristics and habits that we need to
  have if we are going to make our community worth
  living in for all of us.
• Aristotle describes virtue or excellence as a
  characteristic involving choice, consisting in
  observing the mean relative to us, a mean which
  is determined by a rational principle, such as a
  person of practical wisdom would use to determine
  it (Nicomachean Ethics II.6). (Practical
  wisdom is a truthful characteristic of acting
  with reason in matters good and bad for humans,
  VI.5.)
• Courage, for example, is the mean between
  cowardice and recklessness generosity is the
  mean between stinginess and extravagance etc.

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Ethics

• Virtue or excellence is not simply doing the
  right thing, whatever that is. To be virtuous,
  an action must be done at the right time, for the
  right reason (namely, for the sake of the
  beautiful or noble or good), toward the right
  people, and in the right manner (II.6).
• But what is the right action, the right time,
  etc.? Aristotle is not specific. But that does
  not mean he has no answer. It also does not mean
  he is a relativist (saying that what each person
  thinks is right is what is right), nor that he is
  an absolutist (insisting that he knows the one
  right way to do everything).

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Aristotles Pluralism without Relativism

• 1. Humans aim for "living well and doing well," a
  condition that would be both desirable for itself
  and worth living in.
• a.What most people want in their lives requires
  some sort of cooperation.
• b.Our aim of happiness also requires that we be
  able to use all our capacities and potentials to
  their best advantage, especially those most human
  of capacities, the capacities involved in making
  and acting on good choices. This excellence in
  making choices would be "moral excellence" or
  "moral arete."(I.7)
• 2. Therefore we need to consider how to make
  choices well, and how to act on them well. We
  need to consider this both
•         a.in order to be able to identify and
  seek our own goals and
•         b.in order to live with others in a way
  that makes such seeking possible. 
• What then is this virtue/excellence, this making
  and acting on good choices?

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Aristotles Pluralism without Relativism

• 3. Aristotle goes on to describe how several
  characteristics normally called "virtues" fit
  this model of observing a mean between extremes
  courage is a mean between cowardice an
  recklessness, generosity a mean between
  stinginess and extravagance, etc. But he never
  gives a criterion for determining what should
  count as e.g. courage, cowardice, or recklessness
  in a given situation.
• Therefore it appears that there could be several
  different way of adhering to arete and arranging
  a society to enable the pursuit of happiness.
• 4. In fact, for Aristotle there are certain
  checks or parameters on any value system and any
  conception of virtue.

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Aristotles Pluralism without Relativism

• a. Consistency
• b. Social viability
• c. "Contemplation" must be possible.
• d. A virtuous action is done for the sake of what
  is kalos (beautiful noble) to perform
  noble/beautiful and good deeds is something
  desirable for its own sake
• e. All of the virtues mentioned involve doing the
  "right amount" of the "right thing" at the "right
  time." That means that justice - balancing
  claims, actions, desires, needs giving each
  person his/her "due", making restitution or
  reward, etc. - is central and no society can have
  arete without it.
• f. The search for knowledge must be possible.

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