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8. “No one knows whether death, which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.” 9. “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”
Plato uses this observation to illustrate his famous doctrine that the soul is a self-mover: life is self-motion, and the soul brings life to a body by moving it. Meanwhile, in the recollection and affinity arguments, the connection with life is not explicated or used at all.
Socrates believed that a life devoid of introspection, self-reflection, and critical thinking is essentially meaningless and lacks value. This quote emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and questioning one's beliefs, actions, and purpose in life. [2]
Plato's theory of the soul, which was inspired variously by the teachings of Socrates, considered the psyche (Ancient Greek: ψῡχή, romanized: psūkhḗ) to be the essence of a person, being that which decides how people behave. Plato considered this essence to be an incorporeal, eternal occupant of a person's being.
Socrates now raises another topic: the relationship of pleasure to Being and Becoming. This refers to the philosophical distinction between the eternal, perfect, and self-sufficient Being on the one hand, and the transient, imperfect, and dependent Becoming on the other. Being is cause, Becoming is caused. All pleasure arises and passes away.
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]
Plato often invokes, particularly in his dialogues Phaedo, Republic and Phaedrus, poetic language to illustrate the mode in which the Forms are said to exist. Near the end of the Phaedo, for example, Plato describes the world of Forms as a pristine region of the physical universe located above the surface of the Earth (Phd. 109a–111c).
"As being is to becoming, so is truth to belief" (29c). Therefore, in a description of the physical world, one "should not look for anything more than a likely story" (29d). Timaeus suggests that since nothing "becomes or changes" without cause, then the cause of the universe must be a demiurge or a god, a figure Timaeus refers to as the father ...