“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
Socrates
born : in Athens, Greece
April 30, 0469
died : February 11, 0399
gender :male
website
genre :Philosophy
About this author
The philosopher Socrates
remains, as he was in his lifetime (469–399 B.C.E.), an enigma, an
inscrutable individual who, despite having written nothing, is
considered one of the handful of philosophers who forever changed how
philosophy itself was to be conceived. All our information about him is
second-hand and most of it vigorously disputed, but his trial and death
at the hands of the Athenian democracy is nevertheless the founding myth
of the academic discipline of philosophy, and his influence has been
felt far beyond philosophy itself, and in every age. Because his life is
widely considered paradigmatic for the philosophic life and, more
generally, for how anyone ought to live, Socrates has been encumbered
with the admiration and emulation normally reserved for founders of
religious sects—Jesus or Buddha—strange for someone who tried so hard to
make others do their own thinking, and for someone convicted and
executed on the charge of irreverence toward the gods. Certainly he was
impressive, so impressive that many others were moved to write about
him, all of whom found him strange by the conventions of fifth-century
Athens: in his appearance, personality, and behavior, as well as in his
views and methods.
So thorny is the difficulty of distinguishing
the historical Socrates from the Socrateses of the authors of the texts
in which he appears and, moreover, from the Socrateses of scores of
later interpreters, that the whole contested issue is generally referred
to as the Socratic problem. Each age, each intellectual turn, produces a
Socrates of its own. It is no less true now that, “The ‘real’ Socrates
we have not: what we have is a set of interpretations each of which
represents a ‘theoretically possible’ Socrates,” as Cornelia de Vogel
(1955, 28) put it. In fact, de Vogel was writing as a new analytic
paradigm for interpreting Socrates was about to become standard—Gregory
Vlastos' model (§2.2), which would hold sway until the mid 1990s. Who
Socrates really was is fundamental to Vlastos' interpretation of the
philosophical dialogues of Plato, as it is to virtually any
interpretation, because Socrates is the dominant figure in most of
Plato's dialogues.
What do you think about this quotation?
“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”
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