Socrates’ Philosophies

Concerned with how we live our lives
- What gives our life meaning?
He believed that in order to understand the meaning of our lives, and thus ourselves, we must ruthlessly examine everything we do and everything we believe or think we know.
To do this is to truly live a “good life”. --- Achieving a peace of mind as a result of doing what is right as opposed to what society or others expect of you.
Rejected the idea that concepts like virtue and justice were relative concepts. --- He believed they were objective and universal truths.
He equated evil with ignorance.
Thus, to conquer ignorance we must continually examine our lives and think about why we do what we do.

Socrates

469-399 B.C.E “The unexamined life is not worth living”.

Regarded as the founder of western philosophy.
He did not write anything down, but asked questions and developed a new way of investigation those questions, the Socratic Dialogue (or Socratic Method).
Concerned with the human condition, he questioned what constituted virtue and knowledge.
Plato was his student

A step by step process of questions and answers that examine a topic so as to understand the basic principles of truth.
Why a dialogue?
- We cannot always be objective about our own ignorance, we need a foil, somebody to test our beliefs against.
Also, things are not always as they seem: an action may seem bad at first, but actually end up being good in the end.
Because our senses deceive us, using the dialectical approach, reality may be grasped by reason.
The structure or language mirrors the structure of reality. We use language to map out reality therefore we must be very careful about the words we use.
In philosophy, every word matters and we must be very sure about the meaning of the words we use.
Socrates used irony as a method of getting people to see their own ignorance.

Socrates used irony to expose the fallacy of his opponents argument and show them their own ignorance.
Socrates would assume a posture of ignorance (i.e. “I really know nothing at all, please enlighten me…”)
Socrates also used double irony, when Socrates says he doesn’t know anything, his “second audience” (followers) know he is just joking. It was sort of an inside joke.
But Socrates really does mean he is ignorant, even his followers don’t always get it, but we as readers do.
The superficial meaning of the ironic statement is like the appearance of reality, but the real meaning is hidden and must be discovered. Thus, the structure of the language mirrors the structure of reality.

Establish a context and present a clear question - Something open ended, that we often take for granted.
The first part of your dialog should be to rephrase the question and expand on the initial definition.
Next, examine the initial definition or understanding by tearing down pre-conceived ideas or understandings of the topic through a process of question and answer to arrive at a place of ignorance and humility.
Then, rebuild or reconstruct a true understanding of the issue, again through a process of question and answer.