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Socrates understood the Pythia's response to Chaerephon's question as a communication from the god Apollo and this became Socrates's prime directive, his raison d'être. For Socrates, to be separated from elenchus by exile (preventing him from investigating the statement) was therefore a fate worse than death.
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.
The concept of an immaterial soul separate from and surviving the body is common today but according to modern scholars, it was not found in ancient Hebrew beliefs. [1] The word nephesh never means an immortal soul [27] or an incorporeal part of the human being [28] that can survive death of the body as the spirit of the dead. [29]
Embrace these quotes from one of the founding fathers of Western philosophy.
Socrates was one of the most prominent and first religious skeptics of whom there are records; he questioned the legitimacy of the beliefs of his time in the existence of the Greek gods. Religious skepticism is not the same as atheism or agnosticism , and some religious skeptics are deists (or theists who reject the prevailing organized ...
Socrates asks whether the gods love the pious because it is the pious, or whether the pious is pious only because it is loved by the gods (10a). Socrates and Euthyphro both contemplate the first option: surely the gods love the pious because it is the pious.
Conceiving God not to exist would be not conceiving God at all, as it would conceive a being less than perfect, which would not be God. Therefore, the argument proceeded, God could not be conceived not to exist. The ontological argument is a defining example of the fusion of Hebrew and Greek thought.
In contrast, living things are capable of moving themselves. 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.