Source:(Google.com.pk)
An outline biography
Socrates was born around 470 B.C. and as he grew to manhood learnt his family's trade as a sculptor. As well as learning this trade he also received a more formal education in geometry and astronomy. He had a hunger for knowledge that was credible and that could not be undermined by contrary facts. According to an account in Plato's "The Phaedo" Socrates started out with much enthusiasm for the sciences but eventually came to regard his teachers as merely imparting "received knowledge" that they could not themselves prove - he decided to seek true knowledge of "causes" and of "the good" elsewhere and was prepared to rely on his own intuitions as a guide in his search.
Socrates personal appearance was not impressive. He was seemingly rather ugly with a snub nose, piercing eyes, a broad nose and a wide mouth - he nevertheless became prominent in Athenian life because of the range and qualty of his mind and his ideas!!! Athenians who came to know him held that whatever about his appearance he was "all glorious within" - he was on speaking terms with many of those who were at the centre of Athenian affairs.
Alike with other citizens Socrates was called upon to serve the Athenian state in times of war. He served as a hoplite soldier and showed much personal courage - he had a naturally mystically inclined personality and was occasionally found to be somewhat rapt in ecstacies and trances even whilst on military service.
The Athens of the day was morally and ethically dislocated due to the sufferings and struggles associated with the ongoing Peloponessian Wars with Sparta.
A friend, in consultation with the Oracle at Delphi, asked was any man wiser than Socrates. The Oracle replied that there were not!!! Upon being told of this answer Socrates maintained that this implied that he, alone, had this claim to wisdom - that he fully recognised his own ignorance.
From that time Socrates sought out people who had a reputation for wisdom and, in every case, was able to reveal that their reputations were not justified. Socrates regarded this behaviour as a service to God and decided that he should continue to make efforts to improve people by persuading and reminding them of their own ignorance.
What we now call the "Socratic method" of philosophical inquiry involved questioning people on the positions they asserted and working them through further questions into seemingly inevitable contradictions, thus proving to them that their original assertion had fatal inconsistencies. Socrates refers to this "Socratic method" as elenchus. The Socratic method gave rise to dialectic, the idea that truth needs to be approached by modifying one's position through questionings and exposures to contrary ideas.
Whilst Socrates was polite and considerate, in the ways in which he brought people to face their own ignorance and at the same time encouraged them to join with him in a sincere search for truth, many of these interviews were conducted in public in market-place or Gymnasium. The youth of Athens came to regard it as a form of entertainment to see those of pretentious reputation humbled. Some people used the Socratic method to similarly bring others to face their own ignorance but may have been less polite and more personal in their approach. Those so discomfited often blamed those they held responsible for misleading youth rather than themselves for entertaining unjustifiable pretensions.
Socrates came to feel that he had a "Divine mission" to improve the moral education of the Athenians and tended to neglect his business in order to spend time in moral philosophising and in informal educational discussions with Athenian youths.
Prior to the times "philosophy" had been primarily directed towards the natural sciences. Socrates is held to be largely responsible for opening up moral, ethical, and political questions of virtue and justice as being of primary interest to philosphers.
Socrates married Xanthippe late in his life, possibly as his second wife, some sources suggest that this lady was a tad shrewish. Socrates is held to have been way less serious about earning a living than in continuing his "mission" as a moral educator so Xanthippe, as the mother of a family, may have had grounds for impatience.
As to Socrates' personal philosophy - he left no writings of his own so we have to rely on sources such as Plato and Xenophon, who knew him and his philosophy personally, for information.
Both these men were much younger than Socrates and were only really in a position to know him as a philopher during the last decade of his life. Of the two it is Plato who has left the more extensive and vivid record of Sorates' life and teachings in a number of dialogues.
In Plato's dialogue "The Phaedo" Socrates holds that life must be lived with a view to the "cultivation of the Soul". The Orphic and Pythagorean faith background of the day accepted the deathlessness of the Soul, and accepted physical death as also involving the release of the Soul.
Where a person had lived a good life, - had cultivated their Soul, - they were held to merit a far more pleasant situation in an afterlife reincarnation than where a person had led a bad life.
The very fact of belief in an afterlife making the cultivation of the Soul a matter of the utmost importance.
Platos "The Symposium" (i.e. Banquet) has the mystically inclined Socrates delivering a speech that expatiates on the hunger of the Soul for the Good and the True.
Socrates did not seek to involve himself in the political life of Athens as he felt that there would inevitably be compromises of principle that he was not prepared to make. As a prominent citizen he was called upon to fulfil minor political roles.
In 399 B.C. Socrates was accused of "impiety", of "neglect of the Gods whom the city worships and the practise of religious novelties" and of the "corruption of the young".
These accusations may have been to some extent political as Athens had recently been restored to democracy and several prominent opponents of democratic forms of governance had close links with Socrates.
Although friends were willing to arrange for his escape Socrates, in deference to the rule of law, took the poison Hemlock in prison in accordance with a death sentence that he did not consider to be justified.
Two other major quotations from Socrates - (as featured in Plato's Republic which is set out as a report of Socrates' philosophic conversation with several friends) - are featured on our page considering the relationship between "Spirituality and the wider world":-
The nature of God is a circle of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere."
- Empedocles: The Extant Fragments
One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love
- Oedipus at Colonus
"The life which is unexamined is not worth living"
- The Apology of Socrates, Plato (Socrates 469-399BCE)
"Doubt everything. Find your own light."
- Buddha, (563-483BCE)
"I will use my power to help the sick to the best of my ability and judgement; I will abstain from harming or wronging any man by it."
- The Hippocratic Oath (460 - 377BCE)
"I am a citizen of the world"
- Digoenes Laertius (c. 412-323BCE) - Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers
"Time the devourer of everything"
- Ovid (43-18CE) - The Metamorphoses 8 SCE
"Knowledge is power" 'Ipsa scientia potestas set'
- Sir Francis Bacon - 1561-1626 Sacred Meditations. From the 11th Meditation: Of Heresis, 1597
"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."
- John Donne 1572-163. Meditation 17, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624
"I do not feel obliged to believe that same God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for use to forgo their use"
- Galileo Galilei 1564-1642. Diaglogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 1632
"I think, therefore I am" 'Ego cogito, ergo sum'
- Rene Descartes 1596-1650 Principles of Philosophy, 1644
"Man is a social animal"
_ Baruch Spinoza 1632-1677. Ethics, 1677
"Musick has charms to soothe a savage breast"
- William Congreve 1670-1729. The Morning Bride, 1697.
"For fools rush in where angels fear to tread"
- Alexander Pope 1688-1744. An essay on criticism, 1711
"Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains"
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712-1778. The Social Contract, 1762
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"
- Thomas Jefferson 1743-1826. Draft of the Declaration of Independence, 11-28 June 1776
"The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall."
- Thomas Paine 1737-1809. The Age of Reason, 1794
The unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily” – William of Ockham
“The life of man (in a state of nature) is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” – Thomas Hobbes
“I think therefore I am” (“Cogito, ergo sum”) – René Descartes
“He who thinks great thoughts, often makes great errors” – Martin Heidegger
“We live in the best of all possible worlds” – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
“What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” – G. W. F. Hegel
“God is dead! He remains dead! And we have killed him.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide” – Albert Camus
“One cannot step twice in the same river” – Heraclitus
“The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation” – Jeremy Bentham
“To be is to be perceived” (“Esse est percipi”)– Bishop George Berkeley
“Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination” – Immanuel Kant
“No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience” – John Locke
“God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us” – Niccolo Machiavelli
“Liberty consists in doing what one desires” – John Stuart Mill
“It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true” – Bertrand Russell
“Even while they teach, men learn” – Seneca the Younger
“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance” – Socrates
“If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him” – Voltaire
“This is patently absurd; but whoever wishes to become a philosopher must learn not to be frightened by absurdities” – Bertrand Russell
“One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another” – René Descartes
“Leisure is the mother of philosophy” – Thomas Hobbes
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
“There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers” – William James
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit” – Aristotle
“Only one man ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me” – G. W. F. Hegel
“The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone” – John Locke
“Life must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward ” – Søren Kierkegaard
“Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don't know” – Bertrand Russell
“Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck” – Immanuel Kant
“Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits” – William James
“History is Philosophy teaching by examples” – Thucydides
“He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god” – Aristotle
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation” – Plato
“Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly” – Francis Bacon
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing” – mistakenly attributed to Edmund Burke
“Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man's?” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong” – Bertrand Russell
“Religion is the sign of the oppressed ... it is the opium of the people” – Karl Marx
“Happiness is the highest good” – Aristotle
“If men were born free, they would, so long as they remained free, form no conception of good and evil” – Baruch Spinoza
“The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it” – Epicurus
“Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable” – G. W. F. Hegel
“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but of how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness” – Immanuel Kant
“Man is condemned to be free” – Jean-Paul Sartre
“It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to out him in possession of truth” – John Locke
“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy ourselves” – Ludwig Wittgenstein
“That man is wisest who, like Socrates, realizes that his wisdom is worthless” – Plato
“The only thing I know is that I know nothing” – Socrates
“All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” – Voltaire (in parody of Leibniz)
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the on who prays” – Søren Kierkegaard
“Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest” – Denis Diderot
“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things” – René Descartes
“Happiness lies in virtuous activity, and perfect happiness lies in the best activity, which is contemplative” – Aristotle
“I can control my passions and emotions if I can understand their nature” – Spinoza
“Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” – Karl Marx
“It is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence” – W. K. Clifford
“Virtue is nothing else than right reason” – Seneca the Younger
“Freedom is secured not by the fulfilling of one's desires, but by the removal of desire” – Epictetus
“In everything, there is a share of everything” – Anaxagoras
“A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion” – Sir Francis Bacon
“The brave man is he who overcomes not only his enemies but his pleasures” – Democritus
“Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature” – John Locke
“To do as one would be done by, and to love one's neighbour as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality” – John Stuart Mill
“Everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident” – Jean-Paul Sartre
“Man is the measure of all things” – Protagoras
“We are too weak to discover the truth by reason alone” – St. Augustine
“The mind is furnished with ideas by experience alone” – John Locke.
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