I just realized Socrates was right about literally everything.
 Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
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Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
I just realized Socrates was right about literally everything.
I just realized Socrates was right about literally everything.
Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
|
Nothing Ever Happens Shirt $21.68 |
Plato was a pseud. We evolved from monkeys and truth and morality are whatever help you attain your goals
you are maybe
>Morality is whatever helps attain your goals.
Correct. Platos goal was to create a society in which everyone can live happily and he outlined the morality of this society in the Republic.
No need to be cynical.
How many of these shitty threads are we going to have?
Did Socrates even exist, or was he just made up by Plato to further his own views? Even if he did exist, how much can we really know about what he said and what others say he said?
>INB4 “Sounds like Jesus myth hypothesis”
Could go for basically any historical figure whoes first hand accounts no longer exist. Buddha could have been completely different philosophically from what the Suttas say, and definitely never preached anything (except possibly aspects of Zen) in Mahayana
>More than just Plato and Aristotle wrote about Socrates
>Jesus was a composite of different Rabis of the time
>Buddha IS more than one person you fricking moron.
kys.
Did what those other sources say corroborate what Plato and Arestotle said? If it’s something general like “oh he said some stuff and got killed for saying it/doing something”, anyone could use the ambiguity to plug in their own ideas
And nice going proving my point about Jesus and Buddha. Multiple people had multiple conflicting accounts about their teacher/multiple teachers that eventually got ironed out and elaborated on once the religon gained structure. Now how should I kill myself, jumping into traffic or bleach and ammonia in a locked car?
>Did they corroborate exactly?!?!
Considering Plato invented dialectics, no they didn't you fricking moron. They did mention him and some of the stuff lines up, but playing with three thousand year old history will always be murky
>AHA you admitted Buddha is many!
Buddhist teaching says it was many different teachers. Theress Buddhas and Bodhisattva who reincarnate to teach enlightenment, Buddhist teachings are very open about this.
>How kms
Old age, none of that easy way out bs.
>People being consistent with each other and that being a good thing didn't exist before plato
Didn't know that
>Buddhist teachings say
buddhist teachings can say whatever they want, just like Abrahamic teachings can say that God made the earth in a week 6000 years ago. The facts of history should be automatically skeptical towards any statement that cannot be proven in an empirical manner. We can't prove that some buddha googel years ago said the same thing as Siddhartha Gautama, and based on conclusions drawn from other figures in history, there's no way of knowing what he actually said, only good aproximations from the earliest texts. if your point is that Buddhists don't care about that since "the teaching has always existed", that's fine, but non-Buddhists won't and should not take Buddhist claims at face value, any more than a non-Muslim should believe in the Night Journey of Muhammad or non-Hindus believe Hanuman and the forest animals building a bridge to Sri Lanka with pebbles.
I will track you down to your nursing home in 50 years and piss in your prune juice, though. That's a fact.
>Didn't know that
I'm saying that the method of recording was so drastically different and so degraded from time that we wont be able to get anything better than vague shit to corroborate writers from that time.
>Buddhist teachings
moron I'm agreeing with you. I'm just saying that Buddhism is pretty open about it compared to Christianity which is hilariously dogmatic in it's own inconsistent shit.
The theme of this post is The Fog of History.
You could have said that the first time but you instead write in an unclear manner that I then have to parse meaning from and then call me a moron when I get it wrong.
Perhaps you’re more like Plato than I thought
The point of the Fog of History wouldn't be as succinct or effective if I didn't make a simulacrum of of the fog of history by blathering about the point, anon
>Considering Plato invented dialectics, no they didn't you fricking moron
If you believe "Plato invented dialectics", you should never call anyone else a fricking moron. Also, read the primary source material beyond Plato. Just some life advice, anon.
Yes, and Plato says so in his letters. He says that the Socrates of the dialogues is a Socrates born beautiful and new, rather than an accurate portrayal. Assuming we take that letter as genuine.
We can add more names to the list of contemporary accounts of Socrates. Specifically, check out the fragments and testimonia regarding Antisthenes, a contemporary associate of Socrates.
Aristophanes' clouds talk about him way before Plato, so he probably did exist. As for his views? Xeniphon portrays hiim quite differently than Plato does and Aristophanes isn't to be trusted because he was making a parody of his views.
It's pretty clear that Plato is using Socrates as a mouthpiece for his own views, because even his "early" dialogues subtly presuppose Plato's own theory of the Forms, which Socrates almost certainly did not hold to.
Do we really know? I don't think so. He may or may not have believed in the forms.
None of Socrates' other students such as Xenophanes held to the theory of the Forms, and Aristotle explicitly attributes the theory to Plato and not the historical Socrates.
*Xenophon, sorry
This would have to cautiously qualified, since, in the first place, there's strictly speaking no "theory" of forms or even unified account in Plato as we would expect of a theory, but rather, hypotheses that change in presentation from dialogue to dialogue (but their unity as hypotheses for thought seems to be consistent; this is how they're treated in Meno, Parmenides, Phaedo, and Republic; their next most consistent presentation is as interchangeable with genos, "genuses" / "classes" / "species", as in Sophist, Statesman, Philebus).
Secondly, that the word eidos might not appear in Xenophon the way it does in Plato isn't decisive, since Xenophon downplays Socrates' eccentricities to make him more defensible (consider
on the agreement between Plato and Aeschines on the closeness between Socrates and the young Alcibiades, which Xenophon plays down and explains as a short and casual association). It should be noted, though, that Xenophon does use eidos in Memorabilia 3.10, ostensibly by its common meaning as "look" or "appearance", but using the language of the forms as they appear in Plato in para. 2, and Plato's presentation of Socrates as having been interested in natural philosophy as a youth should be compared with X.'s depiction of Socrates' interest in the cosmos in Oeconomicus, and compare dialectic and diaresis in Plato with Memorabilia 4.6.
With Aristotle, we can only throw our hands up in the air since it's difficult to tell what he's doing; Speussipus and Xenocrates both disagreed with his characterization of Plato's forms (which they themselves didn't even agree with), and Aristotle's own accounts waver uneasily: he goes back and forth between "Plato says in the Republic" and "Socrates says"; he takes it that the Athenian Stranger of the Laws is Socrates; he criticizes the forms by allusion to the Third Man argument as if that argument weren't Plato's own argument appearing twice in the Parmenides. He's clearly the most philosophically ambitious and accomplished of Plato's students, but we don't have the works of any other Platonic student to measure him against, his writings sometimes appear to be polemical in presentations of other thinkers, and even what we tend to take as his own doctrines he presents differently depending on circumstance (he defends full personal immortality of the soul in his dialogue Eudemus, but On the Soul denies full personal immortality and says that only the obscure active intellect persists after death; his account of teleology in the Ethics and Politics argues that animals exist for the sake of people, while in his theoretical and natural works their telos is to be the kind of being they are for their own sake). To speak to issue tho, even in the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that "eidos" is Plato's term for Socrates' universal definitions (and again, see X.'s Memorabilia 4.6).
>INB4 “Sounds like Jesus myth hypothesis”
are you saying the Jesus myth hypothesis isn't true, or at least better than other theories? Seems to fit the evidence and motivation of pharisee israelites like Saul well.
I’m saying that the same statements made in the Jesus Myth theory should logically be applied to any pre-modern figure. Most scholars in religion will actually do this (as in, Buddha doesn’t get a free pass for being supposedly born from a lotus in the middle of a lake or having billions of supernatural beings listening to his sermons, people try to at least see what someone might have plausibly said), but the quest for the historical jesus (probably the best way of putting it, since it accepts the bare minimum fact that some real person or some real people were used as a basis for the Jesus story, and reject the idea that there was no historical basis at all for him or that there was some grand conspiracy to concoct him) gets the most buzz in the west because most people are Christian or at least grew up in a Christian influenced culture. Most people in America wouldn’t have a crisis if it turned out that Socrates didn’t exist, but most people would for Jesus, regardless of their actual beliefs or piety
Contemporary sources for Socrates outside of Plato's dialogues:
Aristophanes' Clouds (and some offhand reference in at least one other extant play)
Xenophon's Socratic writings
Aeschines' Socratic dialogues Alcibiades and Aspasia
Isocrates' Bousiris
Eupolis' fragments (another comic playwright contemporary to Aristophanes)
Polycrates' Accusation of Socrates, which doesn't survive, but is attested by both Isocrates (a contemporary) and Libanius
The comic poets both corroborate that he was an eccentric associated with being wise and that he was very poor; Xenophon and Aeschines both corroborate that he associated with Alcibiades (Xenophon plays down whether they were close, Aeschines shows they were as close for a time as Plato's dialogues show); Isocrates, strangely, denies Socrates had anything to do with Alcibiades, which is part of the thrust apparently of Polycrates' rhetorical argument from not quite a decade after the trial; Aeschines shows Socrates teaching about Eros much as he does in Plato's Symposium; among Xenophon's writings is an account of the trial from a friend present while Xenophon was elsewhere.
>Aristophanes isn't to be trusted because he was making a parody of his views
Not fully; one of the subtleties of Aristophanes' depiction is that Socrates never demands pay for teaching Strepsiades or his son, a key difference between Socrates and the sophists; Strepsiadies pays him unprompted because he thinks that Socrates "the sophist" expects it. And while the the specific teachings depicted about nature are likely exaggerated, Plato confirms in the Phaedo that Socrates' youth in philosophy was focused on nature. Comparison with Aristophanes' other plays shows that Aristophanes broadly agrees with Socrates' critique of Zeus that he depicts (since the gods in the other plays tend to be antagonists, and sometimes overt villains), and that his main issue with Socrates is that the latter is imprudent and invites trouble.
>Did Socrates even exist, or was he just made up by Plato to further his own views?
why do midwits love theories like this one so much
socrates was platos teacher
athens was a city with like what, a thousand real citizens? ten thousand at most? not counting slaves, non-citizens, and everyone else who had no participation and political and social life etc.
it was not some sprawling ten billion people metropolis
people know each other and interact with one another
if he made socrates up his fellow athenians would have known it
especially if he made up the whole trial thing which was a pretty big thing to make up
I just realized that Gomi was right about everything.
Congrats. You were just a few thousand years too late, but better late than never
Socrates was a Black person and the most mediocre pre-Socratic was 1000× more philosophically endowed than him.
Literally the first thing he does in Republic is get BTFO by Thrasymachus
Kierkegaard wrote his thesis about Socrates, and was of that opinion that Aristophanes had the most honest depiction of Socrates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Concept_of_Irony_with_Continual_Reference_to_Socrates
Have you read Plato's Parmenides where Socrates' philosophy is inner-refuted
SEW-CRATES!
so tell, what is justice?
I bought the republic and apology/3 other dialogues penguin classics .which of the two books should I read first. I'm thinking republic.