The Prof
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Thumbnails, very fast info. Most all you need to know to know all you need to know. Tho not quite literally true, it's very helpful to see Socrates as the personal teacher/tutor of the boy Plato who, a generation later, instructed the young Aristotle. As an addendum, it is historical fact that the last of the 3, Aristotle, the encyclopedist, became personal teacher to the boy king Alexander the Great.
***
Socrates:
1. He never wrote anything down. 90% of what we know about him comes from the Dialogues of Plato, Socrates' personal student when Plato was a youth in Athens, in the heyday of Pericles, when the Parthenon was new. The Dialogues are made-up discussions on philosophical affairs often featuring a character called Socrates, surely modeled on the master. Plato's most poetic Dialogue, the Phaedo, tells Socrates' heroic death scene. The other 10% of Source is Xenophon, an Athenian general/admiral in the Peloponessian War vs Sparta. Xenophon was also a thinker who wrote Dialogues. He's also, incidentally, author of the Anabasis, one of the greatest adventure tales ever told, the story of the famed Ten Thousand, Greek mercenaries, a generation after the fall of Athens, involved on the losing side of a Persian civil war, stranded thereby in the middle of hostile Turkey, they must fight their way to the Black Sea coast.
2. Socrates never really said anything either. Instead, he used the eponymous Socratic method, eliciting from his pupils desired conclusions via strategic questioning.
3. He was peripatetic, ie, walking and teaching at the same time.
4. He was famously ugly, filthy and gross. Picture a tangled greybeard gunked with food and flies, flabby, hairy breast hanging from filthy toga. Xanthippe is his famously shrewish wife.
5. He was extremely gay. Surrounded himself with good looking, wealthy youths, like Alcibiades, the brillliant warrior, philosopher, drinker, athlete, first abused the by the citizens, later turncoat against them.
6. Socrates was executed by the state, drank hemlock, in 399 BC, at the end of the P-War, for his right wing political views. A not-so-closet Spartophile in a becoming dangerously democratic Athens.
***
Plato:
1. Learned at the crusty knee of Socrates, personally. Wrote the Dialogues, our source.
2. Unlike his teacher who's known for Method, and his noble death, Plato's a writer. He is basically known for 2 great philosophical contributions, uniquely his.
3. His first important position answers the philosophical question, what is Truth? Plato's answer is generally known as the Ideal. The Ideal is fastest understood thru Plato's own Parable of the Caves. Man, according to this lesson, is as a prisoner in a cave, who can't see outside but can see the shadows of outside objects and events on his rock wall. Consider that coffee cup you're holding. Well, says the Parable, it's not a cup, not really, it's not real. It's but the SHADOW of reality, which is the One True Cup, which is the IDEA of the cup, its THOUGHT. That Cup, the mental, exists only in mind---and only it is real, and it is also perfect. Only thought is real, all else just inferior copy. Cynics, like Diogenes a century later, might've noticed that the domain, realm, elevated to all-important status by the philosopher is his own. Kinda like the ABA.
4. Plato's second major contribution to Western thought is his answer to the query, what's the best govt for man? The Republic, Plato's longest Dialogue (about 100 pages) is his retort. In it, Socrates' mentee despises democracy as mob rule, passionate, hysterical---by defintion, unreasoned. Plato's answer to govt is his famous Philosopher-King, the man best bred, brought up, selected out, as most apt by training and disposition to be totalitarian dictator.
5. In practice, Plato's Republic would probably have resembled oligarchic Sparta.
6. Plato founded the Academy, a college, in Athens, which survived him into Byzantine times, about 700 years. Presumably, at its start, at least, the Academy was a right tilting think tank.
***
Aristotle:
1. Aristotle was NOT Plato's pupil, a half generation too young. But he did attend the Academy.
2. Aristotle is an encylopedist. His Botany. His Ethics. His Music, Politics, Grammar... He compiles and contributes heavily.
3. His philosophical, per se, contribution, then, is in the area of Categorizing, Sorting---Logic.
4. Doctrinally, he pushed his Golden Mean, which advised avoiding extremes. Arithmetically, he expressed it such: 6 is the Golden Mean between 4 and 9, because 4 is to 6 as 6 is to 9 (4/6 = 6/9). How he tied that in, I'm not sure.
5. He was hired by Philip of Macedon, before that semi-barbarian king was assassinated, to learn-up his lad, Alex, who conquered the world at 20 and died drunk at 30.
***
After the fall of the classical world in the West, the East went on, obsessed with its Arian and Monophysite and Copt, later Pelagian, heresies. As the Nicaean Creed, the Trinity, under the aegis of Constantine himself, came under centuries of assault.
Heresy is really, at heart, a 10th-Amendment-like declaration of States Rights. Vs overweening central authority.
When history as written, doing the best it can, wakes up again in medieval times, Plato and Aristotle, but not the gross original, play huge roles.
The totalitarian is revived in the form of neo-Platonism. In the East, as early as Plotinus, c 350 AD. Plato's emphasis on the Ideal becomes in Christ a focus on the other-worldly, non-corporeal, ethereal realm, which is True and One and Perfect. The loathing for the mob becomes an internal goal of the virtuous man to master the passions within himself, emulate the Philosopher-King, dictate by reason.
Aristotle, meanwhile, morphs into Aquinas and a' Kempis. Logic, logic, logic. Catholic Scholasticism dominates the Church a millenium, extremely Aristotelian.
Theologians of the early Church look to the ancients for intellectual heft, adopt, adapt Plato, in neo Platonic form, and Aristotelian logic in the Scholasticism of Aquinas.
***
Socrates:
1. He never wrote anything down. 90% of what we know about him comes from the Dialogues of Plato, Socrates' personal student when Plato was a youth in Athens, in the heyday of Pericles, when the Parthenon was new. The Dialogues are made-up discussions on philosophical affairs often featuring a character called Socrates, surely modeled on the master. Plato's most poetic Dialogue, the Phaedo, tells Socrates' heroic death scene. The other 10% of Source is Xenophon, an Athenian general/admiral in the Peloponessian War vs Sparta. Xenophon was also a thinker who wrote Dialogues. He's also, incidentally, author of the Anabasis, one of the greatest adventure tales ever told, the story of the famed Ten Thousand, Greek mercenaries, a generation after the fall of Athens, involved on the losing side of a Persian civil war, stranded thereby in the middle of hostile Turkey, they must fight their way to the Black Sea coast.
2. Socrates never really said anything either. Instead, he used the eponymous Socratic method, eliciting from his pupils desired conclusions via strategic questioning.
3. He was peripatetic, ie, walking and teaching at the same time.
4. He was famously ugly, filthy and gross. Picture a tangled greybeard gunked with food and flies, flabby, hairy breast hanging from filthy toga. Xanthippe is his famously shrewish wife.
5. He was extremely gay. Surrounded himself with good looking, wealthy youths, like Alcibiades, the brillliant warrior, philosopher, drinker, athlete, first abused the by the citizens, later turncoat against them.
6. Socrates was executed by the state, drank hemlock, in 399 BC, at the end of the P-War, for his right wing political views. A not-so-closet Spartophile in a becoming dangerously democratic Athens.
***
Plato:
1. Learned at the crusty knee of Socrates, personally. Wrote the Dialogues, our source.
2. Unlike his teacher who's known for Method, and his noble death, Plato's a writer. He is basically known for 2 great philosophical contributions, uniquely his.
3. His first important position answers the philosophical question, what is Truth? Plato's answer is generally known as the Ideal. The Ideal is fastest understood thru Plato's own Parable of the Caves. Man, according to this lesson, is as a prisoner in a cave, who can't see outside but can see the shadows of outside objects and events on his rock wall. Consider that coffee cup you're holding. Well, says the Parable, it's not a cup, not really, it's not real. It's but the SHADOW of reality, which is the One True Cup, which is the IDEA of the cup, its THOUGHT. That Cup, the mental, exists only in mind---and only it is real, and it is also perfect. Only thought is real, all else just inferior copy. Cynics, like Diogenes a century later, might've noticed that the domain, realm, elevated to all-important status by the philosopher is his own. Kinda like the ABA.
4. Plato's second major contribution to Western thought is his answer to the query, what's the best govt for man? The Republic, Plato's longest Dialogue (about 100 pages) is his retort. In it, Socrates' mentee despises democracy as mob rule, passionate, hysterical---by defintion, unreasoned. Plato's answer to govt is his famous Philosopher-King, the man best bred, brought up, selected out, as most apt by training and disposition to be totalitarian dictator.
5. In practice, Plato's Republic would probably have resembled oligarchic Sparta.
6. Plato founded the Academy, a college, in Athens, which survived him into Byzantine times, about 700 years. Presumably, at its start, at least, the Academy was a right tilting think tank.
***
Aristotle:
1. Aristotle was NOT Plato's pupil, a half generation too young. But he did attend the Academy.
2. Aristotle is an encylopedist. His Botany. His Ethics. His Music, Politics, Grammar... He compiles and contributes heavily.
3. His philosophical, per se, contribution, then, is in the area of Categorizing, Sorting---Logic.
4. Doctrinally, he pushed his Golden Mean, which advised avoiding extremes. Arithmetically, he expressed it such: 6 is the Golden Mean between 4 and 9, because 4 is to 6 as 6 is to 9 (4/6 = 6/9). How he tied that in, I'm not sure.
5. He was hired by Philip of Macedon, before that semi-barbarian king was assassinated, to learn-up his lad, Alex, who conquered the world at 20 and died drunk at 30.
***
After the fall of the classical world in the West, the East went on, obsessed with its Arian and Monophysite and Copt, later Pelagian, heresies. As the Nicaean Creed, the Trinity, under the aegis of Constantine himself, came under centuries of assault.
Heresy is really, at heart, a 10th-Amendment-like declaration of States Rights. Vs overweening central authority.
When history as written, doing the best it can, wakes up again in medieval times, Plato and Aristotle, but not the gross original, play huge roles.
The totalitarian is revived in the form of neo-Platonism. In the East, as early as Plotinus, c 350 AD. Plato's emphasis on the Ideal becomes in Christ a focus on the other-worldly, non-corporeal, ethereal realm, which is True and One and Perfect. The loathing for the mob becomes an internal goal of the virtuous man to master the passions within himself, emulate the Philosopher-King, dictate by reason.
Aristotle, meanwhile, morphs into Aquinas and a' Kempis. Logic, logic, logic. Catholic Scholasticism dominates the Church a millenium, extremely Aristotelian.
Theologians of the early Church look to the ancients for intellectual heft, adopt, adapt Plato, in neo Platonic form, and Aristotelian logic in the Scholasticism of Aquinas.
