Introduction
Socrates and Plato have left a formidable decisive impression of the relationships of the Western mind. The alleged Dark Ages shone extra luminously credit to the Platonic sun. Nevertheless, in spite of their influence on philosophy in general and Neo-Platonism specifically, their influence on Christianity and the structure of society in the middle ages was enormous (Lane, 16).
Main body
Plato’s analysis about the world and people in it shows an exact development throughout his life. At the start he adhered to Objectivism, and thought, with Socrates, that the forms are things in the cosmos that decide the way humans are to think and live (Brace, & Kessinger, 121). Although later in his life he twisted to Realism where the forms as customs for living obtain their own means of being and fit into another world outside, past or behind the world we know.
However, he was not as raw as Socrates who supposed that since the World motivation was fundamentally good, all people had to do to obtain virtue triumph over evil was to reflect on this Reason. Plato recognized that the job of creating order was not achieved without a struggle. Therefore, he had the earthly Soul as mediator between the two worlds, too participates in the disarray and instability of the fore world. One element of the Soul, the Nous, or reason, he maintained that has to try to order the irrational part of it by getting it to contribute in the Good (Torchia, 86). Plato is in this way reckoning with the reliant in the world. In support of Plato, human beings as well exist in a foreground world in addition to a background world. They have a soul and a body. The body has all the uniqueness of the foreground world and nothing of the background world (Brace, & Kessinger 148). The body is liable to decay and it consists of matter. It comes into life when we are born and passes out of life when we die.
Plato’s conception of the human soul is a great deal more complicated than his outlook of the human body (Torchia, 76). Plato pledges to a tripartite soul. Being born in a material body hazes the nous so that it only has indistinct recollections of these forms. But, by consciously focusing one’s brains on these forms in the background world, it is possible for human beings to salvage access to these Forms, a process similar to Socrate’s approach to truth. Through a process of dialectical explanation one ascends in one’s reflection until one reaches at the highest form that of the Good. In this development, one makes the things of this world in addition to the other forms to participate in the Good (Lane, 58). Simultaneously this process allows one to flee the limitations of the body and eventually to return to the background world where one began. Thus, this academic process is redemptive in nature.
Socrates considered that philosophy was unlocked to all, and that philosophical ability could be developed by any person who had the power of communication. Plato’s motivation for building his epistemology was indistinguishable to that of his mentor Socrates (Torchia, 43). Together they wanted to counter the professed relativism of the Sophists. Plato challenged the Sophists as follows: He awarded them the point that all sensory opinion is relative to the status of the observer. Socrates and later Plato made intellectual thought of the eternal verities, once more the supreme worth for Greek life. However, this preoccupation with theoria habitually occurred at the cost of the other aspects of livelihood. Socrates, in the Gorgias, openly rejects hedonism, while the acceptance of a hedonistic position in the Protagoras would stain Plato’s and Socrate’s abrupt departure from their deep-seated views on the nature and the connection between virtue and happiness. In contrast, the Socratic thesis beside the possibility of akrasia would perhaps not take off the ground if it did not have its hedonistic premise; then, Socrates has to be taking hedonism seriously (Lane, 62).
Conclusion
Neither Socrates nor Plato would be contented with an austerely quantitative advance to goodness and happiness which at the same time would include highly prejudiced views on what is pleasing. Therefore on what is good.
Works Cited
Brace, Charles L. The Religion of Socrates and Plato. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Pub, 2009. Print.
Lane, M S. Plato’s Progeny: How Socrates and Plato Still Captivate the Modern Mind. London: Duckworth, 2001. Print.
Torchia, Joseph. Exploring Personhood: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Human Nature. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008. Print.