Socrates, Plato and Aristotle

Period: ~470–322 B.C. | Context: apex of classical Athenian philosophy; Paideia (Werner Jaeger) as the ideal of human formation

I. Socrates (~470–399 B.C.)

Synthesis

Socrates left nothing written; he is known through the dialogues of Plato and the writings of Xenophon. Son of a sculptor and a midwife, he opposed the Sophists by refusing to charge for teaching and by seeking the essence of things through dialogue.

Method

• Irony (eirôneía): feigning ignorance and asking questions (“what is courage? what is justice?”)
• Maieutics (maieutikê): “giving birth” — helping the interlocutor to discover the truth he already possesses within himself
• Objective: the essential definition (ti esti), not particular cases of the sensible

Fundamental Theses

• “Know thyself” (gnôthi seautón)
• “I know that I know nothing” — authentic wisdom begins in consciousness of one’s own ignorance
• God = Intelligence that coordinates everything; ordering activity and Providence
• Virtue = knowledge; evil is involuntary ignorance

Death (399 B.C.)

Condemned to death for corruption of youth and introduction of false gods. He refused the escape proposed by Crito.

Minor Socratics

References

• Plato: Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Meno, Symposium
• Xenophon: Memorabilia, Apology of Socrates

II. Plato (~428–348 B.C.)

Synthesis

Disciple of Socrates, founder of the Academy (387 B.C.). Combines the dialectic of Socrates with Pythagorean cosmology and Eleatic ontology. The sensible world is shadow; full reality lies in eternal Ideas/Forms.

1. Allegory of the Cave (The Republic, Book VII)

Prisoners chained see only shadows; upon being freed, they ascend to the Sun — the supreme Good. Structure of knowledge:

2. Theory of Ideas — “Second Navigation”

Three causes of the existence of the sensible:

1. Idea/Form (idea/eidos): what things really are; eternal, immutable
2. Demiurge: divine craftsman who looks to the Forms and impresses order on matter
3. Receptacle (chôra): formless space that receives determinations

Hierarchy: the Idea of the Good is the supreme vertex of being — “sun of the intelligible world”

3. Dialectic

• Ascending: from the sensible to the intelligible, from cases to universal definitions
• Descending: from hypotheses to consequences
• Continued by: Plotinus, Augustine, Nicholas of Cusa, Bruno, Spinoza, Schelling, Hegel

4. Psychology and Ethics

Tripartite soul (The Republic):

• Rational/intellectual — virtue: wisdom (sophia) — governs philosophers
• Spirited/courageous — virtue: courage (andreia) — guards
• Appetitive/desiring — virtue: temperance (sophrosyne) — artisans

Love: eros as desire for the lost half (myth of Aristophanes, Symposium); ladder of love = ascent from sensible beauty to Beauty itself

5. Politics

• Philosopher-king: aristocracy of knowledge; whoever knows the Good must govern
• Cycle of constitutions: aristocracy → timocracy → oligarchy → democracy → tyranny
• Critique of democracy: can degenerate into demagoguery and tyranny

Principal Works

III. Aristotle (~384–322 B.C.)

Synthesis

Disciple of Plato for 20 years at the Academy; founds the Lyceum (335 B.C.). While Plato is mathematical and transcendent, Aristotle is empirical and immanent: forms are in things, not above them.

1. Logic (Organon)

Propaedeutic for all knowledge:

• Formal: syllogism, axiomatic principles (non-contradiction, excluded middle, identity)
• Logical square: relations between universal and particular, affirmative and negative propositions
• Continued by: Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz; revolutionized by Frege and contemporary analytic philosophy

2. Theoretical Sciences

Metaphysics

• Etiology (4 causes): formal, material, efficient, final
• Ontology: being is said in many senses — 10 categories; act and potency; accident; truth
• Ousiologia: substance (ousia) = form + matter (synolo); form is what something is
• Theology: God = Unmoved Mover, thought of thought, pure actuality, final (not efficient) cause of the eternal universe

Physics

4 elements in sublunary things; ether in supralunary things. Movement = passage from potency to act in space, quality, quantity, and place.

Psychology (De Anima)

Soul = entelechy of the body (form that actualizes living matter)

• Irrational: vegetative (reproduction/growth); sensitive (sensation)
• Rational/intellectual: nous practical (action) and theoretical (thinking)

3. Practical Sciences

Ethics (Nicomachean Ethics)

• Eudaimonia (happiness/flourishing): ultimate end of man; not emotion, but a full mode of life directed toward the good
• Three lives: pleasure, virtue, contemplation
• Virtues (aretê):
  • Theoretical intellectual: intelligence (nous), wisdom (sophia), science (episteme)
  • Practical intellectual: prudence (phronesis)
  • Ethical: courage, temperance, justice, etc. (mean between extremes)
• Justice: teleological; distributive, corrective, reciprocity; equity (epieikeia)

Politics

• Man = political animal (zôon politikón): outside the polis, only god or beast
• 158 constitutions studied; typology: good (monarchy/aristocracy/republic) vs. bad (tyranny/oligarchy/demagoguery)
• Natural slavery (contested by the Stoics)

4. Poietic Sciences

Rhetoric

Methodology of persuasion; analogous to dialectic; enthymeme (incomplete syllogism); three appeals: ethos, pathos, logos

Poetics

• Mimesis (imitation of human action) and catharsis (purification of emotions)
• Genres: epic and dramatic (tragedy/comedy) — the tripartite classification including the lyric is post-Aristotelian

Principal Works

General References

• Diogenes Laërtius, Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (3rd cent. A.D.)
• Giovanni Reale & Dario Antiseri, History of Philosophy, vol. 1
• Werner Jaeger, Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of His Development
• W. D. Ross, Aristotle (1923)