Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle (Short Documentary)

last time if you recall we ended with the concept of Sophia or wisdom which was so important to the ancient Greeks they had come to believe that the wisest man was the best man and that his wisdom could be taught even to the poorest even to the humblest among them these days of course it's sometimes hard to understand why the Greeks made such a lot of fuss about things of this nature in fact our modern view of philosophy in general is that it is abstract and divorced from the real world but the Greeks had to conquer their wisdom bit by bit and they found it fascinating as they ascertained it precisely because it helped to make better sense of the world they lived in so they did the hard work for us and their thoughts about nature and reality and God have so profoundly influenced us that we now take them for granted but in ancient Greece it was all very new as the fifth century before Christ ended a group of philosophers called the Sophists appeared the word sophist a means either one who makes wise or possibly one who deals in wisdom and so these itinerant teachers and lecturers crisscross the country making their living by trading in sophia some of them were good teachers some of them were not and a lot of their wisdom came down to teaching quickness of which in argument so their students could win a case in court or make points in a political debate many Sophists were regarded as too clever by half and critical and subversive because they were prepared to follow an argument wherever it might lead them when you go all out after truth you cannot tell in advance that the truth will be what society would like it to be the sophist resi MacOS for instance argue that rulers and governments make laws to their own advantage and that there's no justice except in the interests of the stronger another surfaced colliculus argue that institutions and moral precepts were established not by gods but by men like these as a matter of convenience at least this is what Plato says colliculus and other Sophists thought Plato was an Athenian born around 427 BC among other things he founded a school of philosophy called the Academy which evolved into the first real University this is a Roman mosaic of one of his classes but Plato is best known before writing a number of dialogues in which philosophical questions were discussed because he was a conservative spirit Plato sometimes made the Sophists out to be more subversive than they were was particularly disturbed by their argument that man is the measure of all things and that man has no way of knowing whether the gods really exist but conservative as Plato was he too was going to subvert old ideas simply by teaching that men had to use their own brains and come to conclusions based on observation and reasoning this after all was what his teacher Socrates had taught him Socrates whom Plato loved was probably the most notorious of the Sophists even though he himself didn't want to be considered one and never accepted pay for his teaching as the Sophists did Socrates favorite pastime was to argue with fellow Athenians and sting them out of their conventions and accepted ideas Socrates questioned everything ordinary people took for granted or preferred to leave unquestioned above all he questioned some of the gods that his countrymen believed Greek art is filled with images of gods who kidnap and lie and steal and cheat and murder unjustly and who commit adultery if these things were bad in a man how could they be good in a God and so Socrates said better listen to your conscience listen to the inner voice that tells you what is truly right and if you don't know keep asking questions of yourself and others until you find out now this kind of free thinking approach was particularly disturbing to Athenians at the time because of what was happening to their city Athens was at war and the war was going badly by the middle of the fifth century BC Athens had become an empire with its member states circling the Aegean Sea and this expansion led her into a series of Wars culminating in the great Peloponnesian War the war between Athens and the states of the Peloponnesus to the south fleet in 431 BC Athens was attacked by sparked are her neighbor and achieved a standoff but instead of stopping there she pursued an aggressive war of expansion in Sicily that led to a catastrophic defeat in 413 BC in which she lost some 200 ships 4,500 of her own men and 10 times as many of her subjects and allies and yet the fighting continued for another decade here's how the historian Thucydides who actually fought in the war described the Peloponnesian War was a protracted struggle and attended by calamities such as Hellas had never known within a light period of time never were so many cities captured and depopulated some by barbarians others by Helene's themselves fighting against one another and several of them after their capture were repealed by strangers never were exile and slaughter more frequent whether in the war or brought about by civil strife this endless and bloody war triggered rebellions throughout the Athenian Empire until Athens was finally defeated in 404 BC in that year Athens was forced to surrender unconditionally to Sparta and its city walls were demolished as a symbol of total defeat yet here in the midst of utter disaster the Athenians were being told by this poisonous old man Socrates to question everything at a time when most people wanted only to lick their wounds not pour salty and so after being barely tolerated for decades as an eccentric nuisance socrates was put on trial in 399 BC on specific charges of impiety and for corrupting the young but actually for asking too many unpleasant questions in a time of crisis this is an 18th century version of how it all ended convicted by a very close vote because he wanted to be Socrates was offered exile but preferred a sentence of death by poison as a martyr to free binary 300 years after Socrates death Cicero the Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero said that Socrates had brought philosophy down from the heavens but by resting it away from the gods and bringing it down to earth Socrates also helped precipitate a crisis in Greek religion you might broadly define the crisis as a questioning of civic religion each Poly's had its civic gods and its civic laws and worshipping the ones and obeying the others was part of being a citizen part of being a member of the political community but neither the gods nor the laws had much to say about morality about real justice let alone about the soul or what happened to the soul after death and those were precisely the issues that Socrates and the other Sophists were most concerned about is your first duty to civil law or to your conscience if public and private Duty clash what are you supposed to do which is more important the individual or the state none of these questions has an obvious answer the novelty was that they were being ask at all and once you start asking questions it's very hard to stop you might even end by questioning the gods themselves for instance the surface argue that if these traditional gods like Athena are inextricably linked to the city and their worship is linked to the laws of the city then the gods must vary from city to city because different cities have different laws which means that gods like Poseidon here have only relative importance and no absolute validity and what kind of God is a relative god as the philosophic sin often is said mortals supposed that the gods are born and that they have voices and bodies and clothes like humans but if oxen or horses or lions had hands and could draw with her hands and paint pictures as men do they would portray their gods as having bodies like their own horses would portray them as horses oxen like oxen if the opions of God's with snub noses and black hair Thracians of gods with gray eyes and red hair furthermore you only had to look around in the streets to see that bad men prospered and good men sometimes suffered unjustly so that either everything is a matter of luck and there are no gods or else the gods are stupid nasty and unjust with a very twisted sense of humor every Greek knew that the gods particularly enjoyed imposing tests on innocent sufferers like Oedipus here who after being abandoned at birth was set up by the gods to kill his father and they marry his mother how can you respect unjust gods all you can do is bribe them or appease them with sacrifices or prayers but even that doesn't seem to work very well as a young man in one of Plato's dialogues concludes either there are no gods or if there are they take no care of men another set of diff questions had to do with the order of the world Greek philosophers of nature called physicists had been trying to answer the riddle of creation since the 6th century BC Fisch said the philosopher Anaximander are the ancestors of human beings who originated in water and evolved through several stages Sena phonies who died in 475 BC noticed fossils and pretty much understood what they were and there were other attempts to develop a scientific approach to knowledge Hippocrates who founded a medical school applied the new approach to what was called then the sacred disease the common term for epilepsy I do not believe that the sacred disease is any more divine or sacred than any other disease but on the contrary has specific characteristics and a definite cause it's my opinion that those who first call this disease sacred we're the sort of people we call witch doctors faith healers quacks or charlatans if the patient be cured their reputation for cleverness is enhanced if he dies they can excuse themselves by explaining that the gods are to blame at the same time mathematicians like Tallis borrow geometry arithmetic and astronomy from the Babylonians and Egyptians and improved on them they found that the application of geometrical rules could help to locate ships at sea and stars in the heavens and help to divide sundials more accurately Tallis himself predicted the Eclipse of 585 BC he accompanied King Croesus of Lydia as his military engineer and advisor and he diverted a river other six century engineers at Samos used geometry to plan a tunnel 1/3 of a mile long which conveyed water through a mountain but even if the applications of the new Sciences could be very practical the discoveries had been made in pursuit of higher end the Greek philosophers thought that the universal truths of mathematics could reveal an immutable eternal reality behind the passing drama of everyday life they believed that geometry could provide a model of timeless nature just as a pyramid was supposed to do Plato suggested that the truths of geometry were not reason deductions from experiment from figures that people drew or constructed but that they were ideal memories memories of the properties of ideal geometrical shapes that existed in some timeless realm which reason could barely apprehend and Plato argued further that there was an eternal world of ideas prototypes of the debased reflections of things that we glimpse here on earth this theory that we do not experience reality in the so-called real world but only its him shadow this theory has haunted philosophy ever since at the same time the physicists were also asking what was behind life did everything start with fire or with water or with some other material element Tallis thought it started with water which by successive evolutions became the other elements Anaximander on the other hand thought it started with a spiritual force knows or the mind whose action on matter produced both movement and order from this idea there grew a tradition which regarded this first principle or if you like this prime mover of life which regarded ease as divine in fact as God a cosmic God who wasn't just responsible for the creation of things and their order on earth and in the skies but who stood for the ultimate truth justice beauty goodness harmony that you could not find on earth and that you could not find either among the traditional gods on Olympus this sort of transcendent God was rather abstract and hard to imagine and so Plato try to produce a more accessible version he began with a view that ideal reality is perfect because it is immutable and changing the objects that we see all around us on the other hand are inferior because they change all the time a perfect object would not need to change cisely because it was perfect there was one kind of visible object however that was not inferior and that was the heavenly bodies they change but they always change in the same way their movement is always constant to Plato such regularity such constancy were very special and they couldn't have happened simply by accident they presupposed a moving soul endowed with mind therefore Plato reasoned there must be a divine mind that moves the heavens and this mind is God at the same time the traditional City gods like Athena and the Civic religion were declining that's because as the police themselves were declining during and after the Peloponnesian War they were losing their autonomy becoming part of bigger states which told them what to do and as the police civic religions lost their hold at least over the elite the Platonic religion of a cosmic God kept increasing in influence Plato in his dialogue tiniest suggested that the human soul was akin to the soul of the stars we come from the stars he argued and after death we returned to them to the celestial city of the stars it was a very attractive idea and one which also had worldly implications because if there be such a place as the celestial City and it would have to be a city because where else would civilized people live then why should we not conceive its counterpart on earth less perfect naturally but still something for the wise educated man to strive for and this became the prototype for what we now call the ivory tower whereas once a socially active life was the ideal now the ideal becomes escape to the contemplative life as the fourth century BC ends Aristotle as depicted in this Roman fresco follows Plato in pointing to the value of the theoretical and celebrating the life of study that the philosopher and the scholar enjoy the meditation on eternal things by the time of Aristotle who died in 322 BC philip of macedon and his son alexander had totally ended the autonomy of the Greek police the earthly City no longer offered the kind of noble aim which a wise man might live for and so the sage took refuge in the heavenly City this is where he would find consolation and strength to bring the movements of the soul into harmony with the movements of the heavens and so the disillusioned citizens of Athens tried to make their escape towards the city of the sky this religion of cosmic forces and the cosmic God was going to become part of the Greek idea the intellectual equipment that everyone who aspired to be educated had to have in the Hellenistic world of the 3rd century BC and after so long after the 3rd century BC in effect that it is still with us today

Channel: Lectures Beyond Beyond

Views: 877,869

Rating: 4.842021 out of 5

Keywords: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Greek Philosophy, History of Western Philosophy, Philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophical Lecture, Ancient Philosophy, Ancient Greek Philosophy, Hellenistic Period, Hellenic Thinkers

Id: nke9geV7g98

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 11 2015