Socrates, Plato and Aristotle…at the fountainhead of wisdom!
By Shradha Kaul
Socrates was a classical Greek Philosopher. For him, the love of wisdom was a sacred path, a holy uest… Socrates has been recognised as one of the founders of Western philosophy but he himself remained an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon. Socrates was a champion of oral modes of communication, standing up at the beginning of writing against its disorganised dissemination. As Socrates did not actually write philosophical texts, the knowledge of the man, his life, and his philosophy is completely based on writings by his students and contemporaries. His most significant contribution to Western thought is his dialectic method of inquiry, known as the Socratic Method or method of "elenchus", which he mainly applied to the assessment of critical moral concepts. This method is also known as Socratic irony or Socratic debate. It is in the form of inquiry or debate between individuals where opposing viewpoints are based on asking and answering questions, stimulating critical thinking and elucidating ideas. Many beliefs ascribed to Socrates have been characterized as "paradoxical" because they seem to clash with common sense. Some of them are, “No one desires evil’, “No one errs or does wrong willingly or knowingly”, “Virtue—all virtue—is knowledge” and “Virtue is sufficient for happiness.”Plato is one of the world’s best known and most widely read and studied philosophers. Socrates’ student and Aristotle’s teacher, Plato was both idealistic and rationalistic, much like Pythagoras, but less mystical. He saw reality in two parts, on the one hand was ontos, idea or ideal which was the ultimate reality, permanent, eternal, spiritual and on the other hand, there was ‘phenomena’, a manifestation of the ideal. Plato was very fond of analogies. Appetite, he said, was like a wild horse, very powerful, but liked to go its own way. Spirit was like a thoroughbred, refined, well trained, directed power. And reason was the charioteer, goal-directed, steering both horses according to his will. In his greatest work, The Republic he used analogies extensively. He designed a society in order to discover the meaning of justice. He compared elements of his society (a utopia, Greek for “no place”) to the three souls: The peasants were the base of the society. They tilled the soil and produced goods, taking care of society’s fundamental appetites. The warriors symbolised the spirit and courage of the society and the philosopher kings steered the society, as ‘reason’ guided our lives. Aristotle was Plato’s prized student and his Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic and literary theory. Aristotle offered "poetry" which included drama- comedy, tragedy, the satyr play and the lyric and epic poetry, and the dithyramb. He examined the "first principles" and identified its genres and basic elements. Aristotle approached literary texts as an innate scientist, carefully examining the features of each "species" of the text. Aristotle illustrated the social function and the ethical utility of art. One of the most difficult concepts introduced was catharsis. As the “father of the field of logic”, he was the earliest to develop a formal system for reasoning. Aristotle observed that the validity of any argument can be etermined by its structure rather than its content. A typical example of a valid argument is his syllogism: “All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.” As per the structure of this gument, as long
as the premises are true, then the
conclusion is also guaranteed
to be true.
