Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Another popular theory held that the maxims were first spoken by the Delphic oracle, and therefore represented the wisdom of the god Apollo. [10] Clearchus of Soli , among others, attempted to reconcile the two accounts by claiming that Chilon, enquiring of the oracle what was best to be learnt, received the answer "Know thyself", and ...
In Apology, a case for Socrates being agnostic can be made, based on his discussion of the great unknown after death, [140] and in Phaedo (the dialogue with his students in his last day) Socrates gives expression to a clear belief in the immortality of the soul. [141] He also believed in oracles, divinations and other messages from gods.
Self-knowledge is one of the main themes of the dialogue, [39] and Socrates quotes the Delphic maxim several times throughout. On the first occasion (124b), Socrates uses the maxim in its traditional sense of "know your limits", advising Alcibiades to measure his strengths against those of his opponents before pitting himself against them.
Socrates' response is to develop his theory of anamnesis and to suggest that the soul is immortal, and repeatedly incarnated; knowledge is in the soul from eternity (86b), but each time the soul is incarnated its knowledge is forgotten in the trauma of birth. What one perceives to be learning, then, is the recovery of what one has forgotten.
Socrates presents his third argument for the immortality of the soul, the so-called Affinity Argument, where he shows that the soul most resembles that which is invisible and divine, and the body resembles that which is visible and mortal. From this, it is concluded that while the body may be seen to exist after death in the form of a corpse ...
The Parmenides dialogue shows Parmenides using the Socratic method to point out the flaws in the Platonic theory of forms, as presented by Socrates; it is not the only dialogue in which theories normally expounded by Plato's Socrates are broken down through dialectic. Instead of arriving at answers, the method breaks down the theories we hold ...
Plato relies, further, on the view that the soul is a mind in order to explain how its motions are possible: Plato combines the view that the soul is a self-mover with the view that the soul is a mind in order to explain how the soul can move things in the first place (e.g., how it can move the body to which it is attached in life). [10]
Apuleius (c. 125), a popular writer, expounded an eclectic Platonism in his books On the God of Socrates and On Plato and his Doctrine, which are written in Latin. [7] Maximus of Tyre (c. 180), like Plutarch, endeavoured to bridge the gulf between a transcendent God and matter by the assumption of numerous daemons as intermediaries. [7]