The Unexamined Life Of Socrates

“A person’s a person, no matter how small” (136). The ethics of abortion has been argued emotionally for many years. In The Unaborted Socrates (Inter Varsity Press: Downers Grove, IL, 1983), Peter Kreeft approaches this important debate using fictional characters and a logic based argument. Socrates, the great ethical philosopher who lived in Athens, Greece in about 400 BC, returns in the present day (then 1983) to challenge the pro-Choice position of an abortion doctor, an ethicist and a psychologist. The result is a thoroughly logical and entertaining exposure of flaws in the pro-choice platform. The author organizes the debate of this serious moral issue -- is abortion murder -- by engaging Socrates in three dialogs. In each dialog Socrates questions a pro-choice representative about his beliefs. In each case, Socrates shows his opponent the fallacy of his position using the opponent's own words. Socrates mission is to “follow the common master” (20), using rational thought to follow the argument wherever it leads. The Unaborted Socrates draws the reader into questioning thoughts of all human beings having the right to live, the harm and evil of liberal abortion laws, and being pro-choice or pro-force.

Socrates was a Western Ancient Athenian Greek philosopher who lived from 469 BCE until his death in 399 BCE. He was a student to another philosopher, Sophists, Socrates was different from most Greek philosophers he wanted to get at the truth and find out how one can truly be ‘good’ and moral in life. “To Socrates the soul is identified with the mind; it is the seat of reason and capable of finding the ethical truths, which will restore meaning and value of life” (ADD IN-TEXT CITATION SEMINAR). We continue to use many of Socrates teachings today, such as, ‘The Socratic method’, which is known as asking a question and within these questions you lead it to the answer you wanted to hear, many uses this as a teaching technique and is shown to be highly effective. A great number of Athenians looked up to Socrates and considered him the wise man of Athens, he had many followers whom would ask questions and seek answers. As popularity and following of Socrates grew so did accusations. The charges laid on Socrates by the Athenians were unjust and therefore his death was highly wrong in the eyes of true democracy that Athens was apparently known for. In this paper, I will discuss how Socrates was wrongfully convicted for the corruption of the youth despite having many young followers, introducing new Gods while still being considered an Atheist, and the main reason he was seen as a threat to Athens was that he brought change to the city.

FUTTER, DYLAN. “Socrates Human Wisdom.” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review 52.1 (2013): 61-79. Humanities International Complete. Print.

The first thing to register when considering the concept of irony in connection to Socrates is that, contrarily to what one might expect, in no passage of Plato's work does Socrates or any of his associates refer to him as an ironist. Rather, it was his opponents who accused him to be an eiron, that is, someone who practices irony. This is because up to Socrates' times, the standard understanding of the Greek word eironeia was exclusively that of deception or dissembling. More precisely, as David Wolfsdorf shows discussing a passage from Oppian's On Hunting, erioneia 'is the use of deception to profit at the expense of another by presenting oneself as benign in an effort to disarm the intended victim.' Accordingly, eironeia and its derivatives were originally meant as 'terms of abuse,' and Plato reserves them more properly for the sophists.

The portrayal of Socrates, through the book “the trial and death of Socrates” is one that has created a fairly controversial character in Western history. In many ways, Socrates changed the idea of common philosophy in ancient Greece; he transformed their view on philosophy from a study of why the way things are, into a consideration man. Specifically, he analyzed the virtue and health of the human soul. Along side commending Socrates for his strong beliefs, and having the courage to stand by those convictions, Socrates can be commended for many other desirable characteristics. Some of those can include being the first martyr to die for his philosophical beliefs and having the courage to challenge indoctrinated cultural norms is part of

Socrates put one’s quest for wisdom and the instruction of others above everything else in life. A simple man both in the way he talked and the wealth he owned, he believed that simplicity in whatever one did was the best way of acquiring knowledge and passing it unto others. He is famous for saying that “the unexplained life is not worth living.” He endeavored therefore to break down the arguments of those who talked with a flowery language and boasted of being experts in given subjects (Rhees 30). His aim was to show that the person making a claim on wisdom and knowledge was in fact a confused one whose clarity about a given subject was far from what they claimed. Socrates, in all his simplicity never advanced any theories of his own

As the wisest man in all of ancient Greece, Socrates believed that the purpose of life was both personal and spiritual growth. He establishes this conviction in what is arguably his most renowned statement: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

The principle that Socrates lived by highlighted the significance of the persistent hunt for wisdom through the collaboration with others. He understood that concentrating on attaining a broader range of the universe through awareness of our inner selves was far more valuable than restricting it to the study of the physical characteristics of the world. By evaluating the corporeal features of the universe, a better understanding of the world which surrounds us could be uncovered. Socrates established that we need to concentrate our study on the mind itself to acknowledge this significance. However, set on self-examination, this did not lead Socrates to set himself out from society. He understood the importance of perspective and of engaging

Socrates spent his time questioning people about things like virtue, justice, piety and truth. The people Socrates questioned are the people that condemned him to death. Socrates was sentenced to death because people did not like him and they wanted to shut him up for good. There was not any real evidence against Socrates to prove the accusations against him. Socrates was condemned for three major reasons: he told important people exactly what he thought of them, he questioned ideas that had long been the norm, the youth copied his style of questioning for fun, making Athenians think Socrates was teaching the youth to be rebellious. But these reasons were not the charges against him, he was charged with being an atheist and

Socrates, a well-known philosopher of the early Athenian era, is believed to be one of the wisest and virtuous philosophers of all time. This belief holds true in the encounters of Symposium by Plato, as depicted by Alcibiades during a symposium held by Agathon. Alcibiades, the last to speak at the symposium, derails from the topic of the night, love, and elicits much praise and gratitude for Socrates. Although Alcibiades did not witness the speech given by Socrates on love, he manages to depict how Socrates endeavors through life with notions that are remarkable to that of what Socrates mentions during his oral, from which much insight is inspired as to the values of which Socrates holds.

As a perfectionist, I grew up ignoring my imperfections, mistakes, and failures. I didn’t just want perfection: I needed it. A red slash on a test or a mistake marked an absolute failure. Because I hid from past mistakes, I never learned from them, making me incapable of growth. I excused my mistakes and “humbly” boasted my overall score. I convinced myself that I never actually made a mistake, so I never learned the information that I had previously missed, thus leading to more errors to hide.

I concur with Socrates's opinion of believing an unexamined life is not worth living, because of the understanding you would be living in complete disregard of the fundamentals of what is happening around you. You would not question where you came from, or the origin of plants and animals, which is what Socrates attempted to change by roaming the streets and challenging pedestrians on the reasons for actions and thoughts.(102) I personally am a Christian and I believe it would be a horrible place if I did not have the relationship I did with God. The advantages, however, to the unexamined life would be a centralized focus on the life that you live without broadening your perspective. What I mean by that, is that you would only focus on the

For Nietzsche, the dying Socrates symbolizes an ideal, in which the fear of death is conquered through reason. This ideal is problematic to Nietzsche in 3 ways: 1) it overlooks the importance of instinct and distorts the relationship between instinct and consciousness; 2) its heavy emphasis on knowledge destroys the possibility of a true tragic hero and in turn, tragedy; 3) its false belief that “thought, using the thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it.”

Everyone has a life to live; however, there are quite different between the unexamined life and the examined life. In the word of Socrates,” The unexamined life, for a human, is not worth living”, “the unexamined life” means people have no question, they never question the life, and they don’t want to know about the truth, and they don’t know who they are. Those people just get up every day, go to work and go to sleep, keep repeating these and never wonder what is the meaning of their life. On the other hand, the examined life is that people always searching for reasons, they know who they are, and they know who they want to be and keep working hard, try to improve themselves. Therefore, the unexamined life is not worth living because they

“Socrates’ positive influence touches us even today” (May 6) and we can learn a great deal about him from one of his students, Plato. It is in Plato’s report of Socrates’ trial a work entitled, Apology, and a friend’s visit to his jail cell while he is awaiting his death in Crito, that we discover a man like no other. Socrates was a man following a path he felt that the gods had wanted him to follow and made no excuses for his life and they way he lived it.