Sokrates and Platon

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Sokrates and Platon

• Philosophy Arrives
• In Athens

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Sokrates (Socrates)

• The son of Sophroniskos, a stone cutter, and
  Phainarete, a midwife, Sokrates was a freeborn
  Athenian citizen, but a commoner so far as his
  origins were concerned
• The tradition has it that Sokrates, too, was a
  stone cutter, but he was not well known for that
  work
• As for his philosophical activity, youve read
  his account of its originsat least as Platon
  would have it

469-399 BCE
3
Sokrates

• Sokrates himself wrote nothing
• Our contemporary sources are
• Aristophanes, the comic poet
• Xenophon, the historian and essayist
• Aristoklesbetter known as Platon
• Because of the disparities in these writers
  portrayals, the question of what Sokrates was
  really like is not at all easy to answer
• The picture Xenophon gives us of Sokrates may
  well be closest to the truth.

469-399 BCE
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Sokrates

• Our sources agree that he talked that he spent
  most of his adult life talking his fellow
  citizens nearly to death about how life is best
  lived, bringing the new form of discourse into
  the very heart of everyday life
• At the age of 70, he was tried and condemned to
  death for not accepting the gods that the city
  recognizes, for introducing new divinities in
  their place, and also for corrupting the young.

469-399 BCE
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Platon (Plato)

• Born into a wealthy, aristocratic family,
  Aristoklesbetter known as Platonwas a close
  associate of Sokrates during at least the last
  ten or fifteen years of his life
• The story goes that he dreamed as a young man of
  political power and of fame as a tragic poet, but
  Sokrates fate soured him on Athenian politics,
  and he turned his back on tragedy and wrote
  philosophical dialogues instead

428-347 BCE
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Platon

• Platon in fact invented the philosophical
  dialogue as a literary genre and turned it to the
  purpose of seducing peopleand also of shaming
  theminto embracing a life of philosophy
• What Plato gives us in his dialoguesfrom which
  he himself is strikingly absentis a vivid
  portrait of the philosopher in action, typically
  of Sokrates in conversation with a multitude of
  different sorts of people

428-347 BCE
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Platon

• As Platon substituted dialogues for the tragedies
  he had wanted to write, so he substituted another
  kind of leadership for the political leadership
  he had dreamed of in his youth
• Sometime in the 370s it seems (though the date is
  not at all certain) Platon founded the
  Academythe first philosophical school
• Among his students Aristotles (Aristotle), who
  arrived in 367 BCE

428-347 BCE
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Platon

• The curriculum of the Academy was at first
  presumably the one described in Book VII of
  Platons Republic, consisting primarily of
  mathematics and astronomy
• Dialectic,Sokrates forte, wasnt introduced
  until Aristotle began to teach in there around
  350
• Did Platon teach there? We dont know, but
  Theaitetos and Eudoxos certainly did. Plato may
  have been merely a sort of guiding light

428-347 BCE
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Platon

• A number of Platons most famous travelsthe
  second and third journeys to Sicilytook place
  after the Academys founding, in 367 and in 361,
  and by the time he returned from those, he was no
  longer at all a young man
• So we have a puzzle in Platon he manages in many
  ways to elude us, and yet the history of Western
  philosophy has justly been called a series of
  footnotes to Plato

428-347 BCE
10
Platon

• What of Platons own philosophical views?
• This itself is a vexed question for now, Ill
  only say that just as the dialogues cant be read
  as either biography or history, they should not,
  I think, be read as anything like straightforward
  expressions of Platons own philosophical ideas
• Like Sokrates himself, Platon loved to hide.
  Neither pursued the goal of self-expression

428-347 BCE
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The Apology (Defense) of Sokrates

• The Apology is one of the most memorableand one
  of the least dialogical of all of Platos
  dialogues
• It presents one side of the trial of
  SokratesPlatons version of the speeches he made
  in his defense
• Yet ironically it must also be read as an account
  of a trial conducted by Sokrates (via Platon)a
  trial of his accusersand all the rest of
  humankind

428-347 BCE
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The Apology (Defense) of Sokrates

• Sokrates charges his accusers most explicitly
  Meletoswith thoughtlessness and frivolity a
  failure to take seriously the most serious things
  in human life, and by extension, of course, he
  charges all of us with the very same crime
• So the Apology itself is an effort to convert, an
  effort to expose our pretensions to knowledge and
  competence as groundless self-deceptions

428-347 BCE
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The Apology (Defense) of Sokrates

• At the core of the work is the idea that the only
  life worth living is that of the philosopher, the
  life devoted to philosophical inquiry concerning
  all the things Sokrates discussed with his fellow
  citizens his whole life long
• The alternative, the unexamined life, Sokrates
  declares a life not worth living
• So to be or not to be a philosopher. Thats the
  first question!

428-347 BCE
14
Next Platons Kriton (Crito)

• The Kriton
• Another of Platos memorable early works
• Characters Sokrates and his old friend, Kriton
• The setting the jail cell in which Sokrates
  awaits the execution of his sentence
• As always, details of the assignment are on the
  Reading Assignments page of the class Web site