Download Socrates and Plato

Socrates
This is supposed to be of Socrates,
but it was made after he had already been dead for some time,
by someone who did not know what Socrates looked like.
Socrates was the first of the three great Athenian philosophers
(the other two are Plato and Aristotle). Socrates was born in Athens in
469 BC, so he lived through the time of Pericles and the Athenian
Empire. He was not from a rich family. His father was probably a
stone-carver, and Socrates also worked with stone, as a
mediocre sculptor.
But when Socrates was in his forties or so, he began to feel an
urge to think about the world around him, and try to answer some
difficult questions. He asked, "What is wisdom?" and "What is
beauty?" and "What is the right thing to do?" He knew that these
questions were hard to answer, and he thought it would be better to
have a lot of people discuss the answers together, so that they might
come up with more ideas. So he began to go around Athens asking
people he met these questions, "What is wisdom?", "What is the right
thing to do?", and so forth. Sometimes the people just said they were
busy, but sometimes they would try to answer him. Then Socrates
would try to teach them to think better by asking them more
questions which showed them the problems in their logic. Often this
made people angry. Sometimes they even tried to beat him up.
1. How did Socrates plan on finding the answers to questions
in life?
2. How would Socrates teach people to think more?
3. How did some people react to Socrates’ questions?
This is what is left of the Painted Stoa,
or Porch, where Socrates used to teach, in Athens.
Socrates soon had a group of young men who listened to him
and learned from him how to think. Plato was one of these young
men. Socrates never charged them any money. But in 399 BC, some
of the Athenians got mad at Socrates for what he was teaching the
young men. They charged him in court with impiety (not respecting
the gods) and corrupting the youth (teaching young men bad things).
People thought he was against democracy, and he probably was - he
thought the smartest people should make the decisions for everyone.
Socrates had a big trial in front of an Athenian jury. He was
convicted of these charges and sentenced to death, and he died soon
afterwards, when the guards gave him a cup of hemlock (a poisonous
plant) to drink.
Socrates never wrote down any of his ideas while he was alive. But
after he died, his student, Plato, wrote some of what Socrates had
said.
4. What are the two reasons why Socrates was put on trial
and later killed?
5. How did Socrates die?
Plato
Plato is known today as one of the greatest philosophers of all
time.
He
was
born
about
429 BC,
close
to
the
time
when Pericles died, and he died in 347 BC. Plato was born in Athens,
to a very rich and powerful family. When Plato was a young man, he
went to listen to Socrates, and learned a lot from Socrates about how
to think, and what sort of questions to think about. When Socrates
was killed in 399 BC, Plato was very upset (He was 30 years old
when Socrates died). Plato began to write down some of the
conversations he had heard Socrates have. Practically everything we
know about Socrates comes from what Plato wrote down.
Plato also thought a lot about the natural world and how it
works. He thought that everything had a sort of ideal form, like the
idea of a chair, and then an actual chair was a sort of poor imitation
of the ideal chair that exists only in your mind. One of the ways Plato
tried to explain his ideas were with the famous metaphor of the cave.
Suppose there is a cave, and inside the cave there are some men
chained up to a wall, so that they can only see the back wall of the
cave and nothing else. These men can't see anything outside of the
cave, or even see each other clearly, but they can see shadows of
what is going on outside the cave. Wouldn't these prisoners come to
think that the shadows were real, and that was what things really
looked like?
Suppose now that one of the men escaped, and got out of the
cave, and saw what real people looked like, and real trees and grass.
If he went back to the cave and told the other men what he had seen,
would they believe him, or would they think he was crazy?
Plato says that we are like those men sitting in the cave: we
think we understand the real world, but because we are trapped in our
bodies we can see only the shadows on the wall. One of his goals is
to help us understand the real world better, by finding ways to predict
or understand the real world even without being able to see it.
6. How did Plato know Socrates?
7. Explain Plato’s theory on the cave.