PHIL 200 Lecture 4: PLATO
Document Summary
Socrates stings/baffles the people he comes into contact with; people see plato as aggravating. And says that he often claims to know nothing. Excellence is defined as the qualities that make someone good. socrates claims that he may not know what excellence is, but he feels that the can shoot down ideas of bad excellence. He has different ideas of appropriate excellence for different people. For example: for men: doing politics, helping friends, harming enemies, for women: managing the household, obeying her husband. He claims that understanding something requires first understanding its definition. A satisfactory definition has to capture all instances of what the thing has in common. Stages of socratic teaching: ask, what is x? , find problems or contradictions in the proposed definition, propose a definition capturing the essence of x. It basically states that: either you already k now what it is to be a good person so you can rest easy.
