Socrates (philosopher)

Socrates (Athens, ca. 470 BC - 399 BC, died) [1]  or Sokrates (ancient Greek: Σωκράτης ) was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. He is considered one of the founders of Western philosophy, but yet he is an enigmatic figure who is best known for the reports of later classical writers, especially through the writings of his students Plato andXenophon, and by his contemporary, the plays of Aristophanes.

Plato is often considered as the main source of information about Socrates ' life and philosophy. [2]  at the same time, however, many scholars believe that Plato, literary artist as he was, "Socrates" too much revered and exaggerated his image so that he would have done or said things went much further than what is plausible for the historical Socrates. Therefore Xenophon, as a historian, often seen as a more reliable source for the historical Socrates. At interpretation of passages in works of Plato there is constantly describes the historical Socrates or Plato discussion or there are fictional projection. As Martin Cohen put it, Plato, the idealist, offers "an Idol, a master figure, for the philosophy. A Saint, a prophet of the "Sun God", a teacher who was sentenced for his heretical doctrine. " [3]

By his appearance in Plato's dialogues, Socrates is known for his contribution in the field of ethics, and it is this Platonic Socrates who also lends his name to the concepts ofSocratic irony and the Socratic method, or elenchus. The Socratic method remains a widely used tool in a wide range of discussions, and is a form of pedagogy in which a series of questions are asked not only to get answers, but also to encourage the basic understanding of the issue. It is also Plato's Socrates which is a major and lasting contribution in the field of the knowledge theory and logic, and the influences of his ideas and approach remain strong in providing a basis for Western philosophy that come after him.



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[hide] *1 The Socratic problem  ==The Socratic problem[ Edit] == To get a sense of the historical Socrates are derived three primary sources: Aristophanes, Xenophon and Plato. The problem to get out of the descriptions of these contemporaries distilling something with certainty about life and the method of Socrates is so difficult, that it is sometimes described as ' the Socratic problem '. The real Socrates remains hidden and we continue to rely on interpretations about his figure and his life, especially since he himself never made something in writing. Apart from these three main sources provide also useful information on Aristotle 's comments about the unwritten philosophy of Socrates. ===Aristophanes[ Edit] === <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">The earliest known source available is the playwright Aristophanes (ca. 450-ca. 386 BC) In his comedy "the clouds" from 423 BC using the philosopher Socrates and allows him for as someone who exerts a blight on the Athenian society and has no respect for the gods. ===Xenophon<span class="mw-editsection" len="334" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ Edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] === <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">The soldier and historian Xenophon (ca. 430-ca. 350 BC)<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-4" len="171" style="line-height:1;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;"> [4]  in his Memorabilia makes mention of the fact that he ' never had met someone who suggested such a interest in what each of his companions of knowledge possessed '. It seems Socrates, Plato's image of as someone who wanted his knowledge by means of probing increase dialogue, to be confirmed. Xenophon depicts Socrates off though as a practical and helpful person, who advised him, inter alia, about the best way to make money (Xenophon, Memorabilia 2.7) and an ability to manage (Xenophon, Oeconomicus), which differs from the Socrates that Plato describes the philosophical and material indifferent. Most likely late Xenophon Socrates here act as spokeswoman for reflections on things that interested him. Other works in which Socrates, Xenophon Anabasisnamed his HellenicaApologiee, and Symposium. What are increased credibility is precisely that sober setting as a historian and writer of the Hellenica, that the history of Greece in the period 411-362 BC covers. In that respect, it is to defend that Xenophon as non-philosopher in some respects a more accurate portrait of Socrates has hung up than Plato did. Only is commonplace to the Socrates are what to make plausible that after his death the inspiration for writing so many Socratic dialogues.''' ===Plato<span class="mw-editsection" len="331" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ Edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] === <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">Plato (427 – 347 BC) was about 25 years old when Socrates was condemned. He came like other young men of his social class often in contact with Socrates and knew him very well. He was the main student of Socrates. Historians agree that names of people, places, and dates in his dialogues often match what archaeological and literary research in Glatz, Prussian Silesia. It seems therefore likely that when he let Socrates as a main figure occur, the described situations and dialogues pretty well in line with the reality, even though the dialogues themselves dramatized and literary edited. However, here, that what Plato writes about Socrates, a faithful reflection of his ideas or that it is not possible that he was the figure of mobilising its own Socrates philosophical concepts and wording. For a great many episodes from the life of Socrates Plato was not present. So he was not on his trial, and the knowledge he had about the youth of Socrates also had to from second hand. ==The Basis of his teaching method<span class="mw-editsection" len="352" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ Edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">You Knowthe slogan, Γνωθι σεαυτον (Gnothi seauton), appeared its leitmotif at the approach of knowledge about reality. ''How can anyone know something, if he does not know himself? Who knows then? And what is the value of such unfounded knowledge? He seemed especially themselves looking for that ultimate knowledge of the deepest self, without which one really knows nothing''. And if one that knows, then at least know onewho knows nothing, and can from there be trawled real knowledge.
 * 1.1 Aristophanes
 * 1.2 Xenophon
 * 1.3 Plato
 * 2 based on his teaching method
 * 3 communication as method
 * 4 Moral integrity as a starting point
 * Socrates and the Sophists 5
 * Socrates and Plato 6
 * 7 the trial of Socrates and his death by the poisoned cup
 * 8 see also
 * Literature 9
 * 10 external link

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">That deepening of knowledge according to Socrates had to happen as a midwife, a child in the world to intervene in turn by helps connect with encouragement to continue or to stop, and sideways to help push and massaging. He called this Conference technique the τεχνη μαιευτικη (maieutikè technè), the midwife technique. It was to be at the ' learner ' or the seeker after truth apply this technique to help him that truth, the real knowledge, to discover in himself. Because only one real knowledge in itself. Everything else is hearsay and see's do counterfeit knowledge. Knowledge had to according to him totally authentic. His technique came to the other on like there was jumped from branch to branch, but Socrates was just aiming to test the firmness of the previously acquired knowledge, and all that had to be left loose sat. He came on many arrogant and pedantic about with his eternal questions, which were intended only to the other in the long run to come himself. But this was often not thanked him, certainly not by the larger established egos of the society (which neither knew himself).

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">No writings of Socrates are preserved. For a picture of his work one must rely on what others have said on this subject, such as Plato in his dialogues Apology and Symposium and in Xenophon's writings. The Greek comedy poet Aristophanes in his work processed vitriolic criticism on Socrates ' philosophy. This playwright, although heavily caricatured, gives an idea of how Socrates to the ordinary man in the street happened to, but need not to be taken as reference point the sound on the value of its philosophy itself arrives. ==Communication as a method<span class="mw-editsection" len="350" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ Edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">Socrates suggested communication Central. One found him always somewhere on the agora surrounded by a group of dedicated listeners, with some achterdochtigen in between or even eavesdroppers. He tested his ideas constantly in so-called ' dialectic ' or Socratic conversations with all kinds of people, and compressed as it were their knowledge from them, then on truth and sustainability content to scrutinising and, where necessary, dismiss. One named this aporiarejection, from the Greek aporein: no way out info. He also compared his approach to that of a hornet, which a slow horse (Athens) tried to keep awake, and inevitably that earned him enemies on. not everyone could this method of research (elenchus) after all appreciate it. Topics for these dialogues were mostly virtues as justice, self-control, piety, bravery and wisdom. By reasoned examination of everyone's knowledge of applications were looking for Socrates to generally applicable truths and principles for the human doings, essences. He was convinced that it was possible to find the virtue by insight and knowledge and found that everyone can learn the virtue, being a matter of intellect. This thinking is also called called the ethical intellectualism . Someone who had true knowledge of the good, also according to Socrates would not be able to do evil.

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">Socrates applied the inductive method of reasoning, where he from a collection of details to the whole building, either by review of many individual insights to a generally applicable truth tried to come. Its starting point was "I know that I know nothing"; Thus he attaqueerde methods of the sophists, the itinerant teacher-experts of those days, but acknowledged that he, too, had not the final answer on the ethical-epistemological issue.Though he recorded a negative result: he staked out sharper wondering what was onvirtue. He consistently lived the now found themselves principles. ==Moral integrity as a starting point<span class="mw-editsection" len="365" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ Edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">Two examples of that moral integrity are the following: at one point in Athens (404 BC) there was a period of terror (by the so-called. Thirty Tyrants) This cabal tried to compromise by Socrates to recommend a certain Leon to arrest him that lived in Salamis. However, the thirty could assert jurisdiction according to the law No. This Leon would then be put to death. Socrates refused. He held himself only but life because not long after the thirty were replaced by a new democracy. Two years later, under the newly established democracy, was he happens to be President of the people's Assembly (which function I namely) right after Athens had fought a naval battle at the Arginusae . There were 25 ships lost, but the enemy lost about 75. The Athenian commanders, however, were not raised by a storm to help any survivors and gone back to the seem to mountains (which then could be with a obool home burned in the mouth for Charon the Ferryman). The Athenian people was furious and wanted those concerned prefer immediately Lynch, but they wanted that give the appearance of legitimacy through a roll-call vote in the House without accompanying process. Socrates came to stand alone by all kinds of threats, but he continued to refuse to go along with the procedure. He was drowned out and the executions took place anyway. His students found this strange, but they could do nothing to avoid death penalty . ==Socrates and the Sophists<span class="mw-editsection" len="349" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ Edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">With the Sophists, Socrates had in common that he settled on human behaviour and less on natural philosophy as the presocratics Presocrats originate or. And as well as the Sophists, Socrates the spoken word found important but with the interpretation that he gave, he precisely against them. The emphasis that sophists concentrated on "get it right" rather than "right", leads to a cynical view of life following Socrates, in which truthfulness and ethics are secondary. The importance that the Sophists in persuasion and eloquence as an end in itself, only betrays a lack of understanding of the truth in the form of objective and generally applicable standards for human behavior to assess. The pretense of the sophists to get students to teach a correct attitude to life can not be fulfilled according to Socrates. ==Socrates and Plato<span class="mw-editsection" len="343" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ Edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == <p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">Plato was actually a poet. One day he walked with some roles own work under the arm to the place where he allows the participation in a contest for the best poetry could live up to. When he on the agora (Greek for "market") ran, he heard the voice of a man who had his attention. He went on a group of audience around that guy off and met Socrates. He remained there all the time are enthralled listening, until it was too late for his work still on the desk's issue. This incident threw his whole life and he began to follow and study the way of Socrates.

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">Because we know Socrates mostly through Plato, it is (still) unclear where Socrates ' learn exactly ends and where those of Plato begins. In his Metafysika (987b) says Aristotle, however, that Socrates passed to the physical world and his thinking was the first dedicated to the moral and thinker in this atmosphere on definitions pointed to the universals, and that Plato followed him. Plato assumed there could be no general definitions of the sensory things (which were always subject to change observable) and that we therefore have to find elsewhere so the general definitions. Plato called the general definitions: "Ideas". All things considered, we can say that Plato expanding on the Socratic dialectical method that Socrates the (mostly still imperfect) definitions of others punched in their context (and with which he is not always popular made). Awarded to an independent existence the ideas like Plato, Socrates did this not in respect of its definitions. ==The trial of Socrates and his death by the poisoned cup<span class="mw-editsection" len="382" style="-webkit-user-select:none;font-size:small;margin-left:1em;line-height:1em;display:inline-block;white-space:nowrap;unicode-bidi:-webkit-isolate;font-family:sans-serif;"><span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">[ Edit<span class="mw-editsection-bracket" len="1" style="color:rgb(85,85,85);">] == The death of Socratesby Jacques-Louis David, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York<p style="margin-top:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">In [http://www.microsofttranslator.com/bv.aspx?from=nl&to=en&a=http%3A%2F%2Fnl.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F399_v.Chr. 399 BC] Socrates was sued and eventually sentenced to death for "not worship of the gods of the city" and "introducing new gods" in addition he would also have had a bad influence on the youth: "commits injustice by the gods: SocratesMeletus that graces the city not to venerate and by introducing new divine beings; Furthermore, he commits injustice by its bad influence on the youth. The demanded punishment: death"may have not understood the Athenians had his ideas and intentions; in any case aroused his critical attitude to the Athenian form of democracy and often breaking down to the ground-based views of the elite major annoyance. His opponents concocted this indictment to get rid of him. In addition, Socrates was suspected to have geheuld with those in power during the foreign domination, which took place in Athens for a while (after the Peloponnesian War, when Sparta defeated Athens) and also merged with an undemocratic period. However, he was granted an amnesty whereby a direct political indictment was no longer possible during the process. It is also for this reason that the process around Socrates us now for comes as a mock trial.

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">Socrates defended himself by during the process to enter into a dialogue with the jury by prosecutors according to are always consistently used dialectic method. Almost all jury members at the start of the process were hostile to him. He drove them so closely that they in the at the end of that dialogue could not else than to recognize the falsity of the indictment. Socrates was so convincing that he almost failed the majority of the jury members to decide in his favor. The difference between the number of jury members pro and con punishment was so small that the judges were allowing themselves to advocate his punishment Socrates. Instead of trying to persuade the last doubters, however, about a totally different bow threw Socrates: that of the spot. He suggested total ridiculous penalties for judges and jurors and laughed out. This chased the jury so against him in the armor that he eventually got death penalty by means of poison. The ability to escape from Athens and thus to avoid the execution of the death sentence, had Socrates pass away. He found that after years as a citizen of Athens to the Athenian laws have signed up, wrong to now to evade a judgment based on those laws, how unjust this judgement was.

<p style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">Socrates chose drinking a cup with a slow-acting deadly poison; in the midst of his pupils and friends with whom he could speak for a while. The day that the judgement would be consummated, he discussed then also all kinds of philosophical issues. So Socrates believed in the immortality of the soul. According to him could happen to a good man, not with life and not only nothing after death. His last words were related to the traditional habit in the Temple of Asklepios, the god of medicine and son of Apollo, to sacrifice a cock to thank for healing, healing to beg or to accompany impending death to the soul of the deceased to Hades, the underworld. Just before his death, he spoke to his friend Critobulus these last words: "Critobulus, we are owed to Asklepios a cock; pay him, don't forget it ".

<p lang="en" len="500" style="margin-top:0.5em;margin-bottom:0.5em;line-height:22.3999996185303px;color:rgb(37,37,37);font-family:sans-serif;">Plato's description of the trial of Socrates in the Apology and his death in the Phaedo are among the best known works from philosophy.