Greek Philosophy 7.2: Socrates' Philosophy
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- Опубліковано 18 чер 2024
- An approach to Socrates' philosophical ideas.
00:00 Introduction
01:52 Orientation to Socrates' Thought
02:30 Socrates' Philosophia: Re-Orienting Values
08:06 Freedom from External "Tyranny": Excessive Authority and Conformity
21:10 Freedom from Internal "Tyranny": Excessive Pride, Appetite, and Aversion
28:00 Socrates' Logos: A Search for Meaning
35:45 Socrates' Daimōn: The Inner Voice of the Spirit
41:44 Philosophy as a Way of Life
45:00 Inward and Outward Dialogue
45:37 Epictetus on Socrates' Journal
46:45 Socrates on the Self and Psychē: Acting from Soul
59:26 Ethics: No one does wrong willingly; wisdom and virtue
1:04:25 Ethics: It's better to suffer than to do unjust harm
1:08:41 Socrates in Context: Homer, the Polis, and the Sophists
1:10:27 Socrates' Legacy: The Socratic Movement
Your content is gold. I started learning philosophy on my own and they've been a great help.
Thank you.
I cannot thank you enough for these videos on Socrates. Great content and you present this info with such a good vibe. James
As a Greek its nice to listen to your lectures and grasp the analysis in English. Socrates was the most important philosopher in ancient Greece.
Thanks for the encouragement and feedback, and ευχαριστώ!
Thank you very much for making me think.
Listened to it while running for a couple of hours.
Good to hear-I think the Peripatetic philosophers would approve!
Thank you very much for this fantastic lecture. Thoroughly enjoyed the content and also your skillful style of delivery 👍🏼
Great to hear-thank you for the feedback!
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Thanks for the encouraging feedback, and greetings to the philosophy club!
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Hello! First of all, very nice videos! Will there be more videos, specifically on Plato and Aristotle?
Hi Filip, thanks for taking the time to write. Yes indeed, more content specifically on Plato and Aristotle are next on the agenda, and-eventually-I'm hoping that we'll make our way through Hellenistic philosophy and Neoplatonism too. I appreciate the feedback!
What is the source for this lecture?
Hi Harsh: Thanks for asking! Ancient sources are cited in the video; for example, Plato's Apology of Socrates 38a at 03:01; and modern sources are also cited in the video, e.g. the Asch studies at 17:05. If there's anything that isn't clear, feel free to let us know.
What is the difference between Sophia vs Phronesis? And do we know what Socrates meant by those differences here?
@@DelphicPhilosophy Helps a lot. Thank you!
Hi Stephen, thanks for the excellent question! Briefly, we're not certain whether Socrates himself (or even Plato's Socrates) draws a clear line between Sophia and Phronesis-both can arguably mean 'wisdom', 'insight', or 'understanding'. But Aristotle draws fairly technical distinctions, for example in Nicomachean Ethics 6: roughly, Sophia amounts to knowledge about Forms or patterns, general non-contingent principles, while Phronesis involves the application of that knowledge in practice, with sensitivity to particular circumstances. John Cooper's book Pursuits of Wisdom (Princeton, 2012) has a chapter on Socrates that attempts to determine how he uses wisdom-terms to describe a grasp of human values. I hope that's helpful (and sorry for the double reply; it looks like the earlier one was deleted due to a glitch)!
Hi can I ask?
If we connect the philosophy of Socrates to Rene decartes, an individual who knows himself is an individual who?
Good question! I think you mean: how does Plato's Socrates, in comparison to Descartes, think that individuals "know ourselves"-and who is the individual who has this knowledge? Both can be tricky, but here are a few thoughts.
(1) Descartes' famous "cogito ergo sum" argument, in Meditations on First Philosophy, supposes that I can be absolutely certain of my own mental states, the direct contents of my conscious cognition, but I can't be certain about much else. So-Descartes' consciously thinking mind, attending closely to its own thoughts, is arguably a candidate for the self that knows itself.
(2) Plato's Socrates seems to suggest that there are many candidates for the "self" that a self-knower knows-like one's possessions, physical appearance, and psychē (e.g. Philebus 48c-e); but Socrates usually talks as if psychē is the best of these candidates, the one that is right (Plato's Phaedo 115c-d, Xenophon's Memorabilia 53-55, etc.). When we try to care for or cultivate our selves, we should try to care for our psychē (Apology 29d-30b; Alcibiades I 128a-131a). It's important to stress that he isn't saying we should *ignore* our well-being in other ways-Xenophon says that Socrates encouraged his companions to take good care of their physical health, and to form lasting and mutually respectful friendships, for example-but that other concerns shouldn't override care for the well-being of the psychē, on which the rest somehow rely.
So, what is psychē? Literally, it's "breath", but more broadly, for many Greek philosophers, it's the life-principle, that in virtue of which something is animate and not inanimate (as in Plato's Phaedrus); indeed, one Greek word for "animal", as Plato points out, is empsychos, "having-a-psychē-inside"; and similarly the English "animal" itself derives from the Latin "anima," a word used to translate the Greek psychē (both literally mean something like "breath" or "wind"). The story is more challenging in authors like Homer, but by the 5th-4th century BCE, psychē is starting to mean something more like our word "psyche" or even its later translation, "soul" (but without some of the connotations of that English word): that is, psychē is the locus of a plurality of states, experiences, and motivations, including appetites, desires, and aversions; anger, pride, and states of deep emotion; speech, reason, reflection, conscience, value, and meaning-making (see Republic 4, 443c-e for a lovely description of the "harmonization" of these faculties in a just "inner city", and see the Liddell-Scott-Jones dictionary s.v. logos for the latter).
So, one answer would be: Socrates *might* think the self is the psychē, and that includes a far broader field than Descartes' "mind", because it includes many functions of life-experience and agency (above), like a wide range of sensitive and emotional and reasoning experiences and actions. But note that Plato also thinks that a lot of these psychic faculties are impermanent and likely not the core of the person (compare Symposium 207d-208b, Phaedo 65a-67d, 79c-e); what's really special is the kind of consciousness that can apprehend the Platonic Patterns or Forms, a faculty that he sometimes calls phronēsis (Phaedo 79c-e), which is close to Aristotle's notion of nous-that faculty of the psychē that might be immortal, depending on how some passages in Aristotle's De Anima are read. So a deeper question is: how similar is this more specified Platonic and Aristotelian notion of nous to Descartes' mind? I think nous is still a rather broader notion than Descartes' mind, and in some contexts (including its Homeric roots) is closer to English notions of "awareness" than "thinking," but that's another issue!
Here's a more basic point. In contrast with Descartes, I think, Socrates is concerned with the question of self-knowledge because he wants to know how to cultivate or better the self (as in the possibly Platonic Alcibiades I, 128a-134c); Descartes' concern is more with certainty and defeating skepticism, with getting clear about what we can really know. So those orientations also give them different concerns.
I hope that's some help! You might find this article interesting: Ancient Theories of Soul at plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/
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