Socrates’s Main Concern: The Soul Taken from the Chapter no. 2 of the book The Philosopher’s way written by John Chafee. Introduction and Background: The purpose of this thesis is to identify the main key ideas of Socrates concern with the betterment of the Soul. Highlighting the word ‘Psyche’ as the soul which is immortal or imperishable. Defining Soul as the main identity of a person, it is what defines a person, his acts, and his mindset. He added that every soul has happiness in it but not…
The Taming of the Private Tyrant: An Analysis of the Hydra, the Lion, and the Human as the Image of the Soul in The Republic by Plato This philosophical study will define the taming of the tyrant in The Republic by Plato. Socrates presents the image of the soul through the three symbolic identities of (1) the hydra, (2) the lion, and (3) the human to identify just and unjust behaviors. The hydra represents the lust of human ambition with its many heads; the lion represents the grandiosity of…
The two pre socratic philosophers i chose to compare, were Anaximenes and Pythagoras. The reason i chose to compare these two, was because their views on nature in their philosophy was so drastically different. Anaximenes believed that all things are made of air, it is the source of all things. At one point in time everything was air. Air is a neutral substance that is found everywhere. Natural fοrces acting οn air transfοrm it intο other things which essentially come together to create the…
parts, the body and the soul. The soul is the form of the body. Although the soul exists, it should not be interpreted as the soul and the body being independent elements. The soul is distinguished from the body however it has to be added to the body, making the body alive. The soul is the first principle of life that makes a potentially human body what it is. It is because the soul is the principle of intellectual understanding. This intellectual character of the soul implies that it is…
I thought both Glaucon and Adeimantus had made very strong and serious objections against Socrates about the view of justice being an intrinsic good, but I would argue that their arguments could only apply to certain people and personalities. Glaucon suggests that there are three types of good. The first good Glaucon had explained was intrinsic good which he had described “as a kind of good we welcome, not because we desire what comes from it, but because we welcome it for its own sake-joy”…
Between Plato’s dialogues and the Greek tragedies composed by Sophocles, there remains a rift between the idea that knowledge is the ultimate achievement versus the idea that it is ultimately the downfall of one’s mental and emotional well-being. While Plato argues that knowledge of absoluteness, true beauty, and otherwise complete enlightenment can only be achieved in fractions by means of cognitive awareness or fully after death, Sophocles presents the notion that we are better off blind to…
Famous philosopher, Plato, once said, “Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil”. What makes one evil? One’s harmful actions? Lack of empathy? Going against other’s morals? All acts of cruelty have one thing in common: ignorance. Ignorance of accepting others ideas. In the short stories, “The Lottery”, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, and “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, evil characters ignored the protagonists’ reasoning to stay alive. In “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, on a sunny…
In Plato, Republic, Book VII, the core of the book revolves around justice and its implications from both an individual and collective perspective. Plato does not have Socrates argue that justice requires getting everyone out of the cave because in actuality, there are two parts to justice and the cave: the truth and the false. According to Plato, people often live in illusion. Illusions appeal to sensible people and their senses whereas reality, does not function with reason alone, it includes…
A theory written by Plato, ‘The Allegory of The Cave’ explains the concern of human perception. Plato differentiates between people who mistake sensory knowledge for the truth and people who really do see the truth. The material world is just partial pictures of true images. Relying on physical senses alone, makes you “effectively blind”, according to Socrates. The world we see is a reflection of what the world represents, not a very accurate representation. Plato claimed that, “Knowledge…
The soul is an important issue present in the Platonic texts The Meno and Phaedrus; each one has similarities and differences from each other, which are going to be present in the following paper. I’ll develop the text by explaining how both texts have views on the conception of the soul, the conception of the soul seems to be based on the same foundation yet it differs in certain key ways. Looking at certain similarities, first I’m going to explain how in both texts the soul is immortal, then I…