>>>>The Sophists challenged traditional morality.
Sophocles asserts that tradition is a legitimate
grounds for believing in justice. But Plato
would come to doubt that that was a legitimate,
that was a strong, that that was a sufficient
defense of morality. And we see the germs
of his doubts about tradition already in the
teachings of his great mentor, Socrates. Socrates
was famous for inhabiting the public spaces
of Athens and questioning Athenians about
their beliefs. And Socrates, through his questioning,
would expose how flimsy ordinary people's
beliefs about morality truly were. Public
Greek culture accepted that there were traditional
virtues, especially cardinal virtues like
self-control, like wisdom, like piety, like
justice, like courage. And Socrates would
question Athenians about what these virtues
meant to them. And he exposed the fact that
people-- first of all, had hardly reflected
at all upon the kinds of virtues or qualities
that they would say mattered most to them.
Two, he would show that in fact, all of these
virtues are ultimately dependent upon reason,
upon wisdom. And Socrates seems to teach that
all virtues are a form of wisdom. He has a
deeply rationalist, a philosophical account
of what virtue truly is. And Socrates also
begins to focus on this core term of Greek
philosophy: eudaimonia. It's a word as we
talked about that can be translated as happiness,
as well-being or as virtue, as some sort of
flourishing that implies moral excellence.
And so this word happiness in Greek is a rich
word that can mean happiness in the sense
of success and pleasure and well-being, but
it can also have deeply moral connotations.
Socrates will question whether people mean
by happiness, simply success and pleasure
or whether they mean moral virtue. Whether
they mean moral accomplishment and moral commitment.
And he questions ordinary Athenians about
their beliefs and what flourishing, what eudaimonia
means to them. Now Socrates comes to believe
that people in ordinary life use words like
courage and that there are examples of courage.
He believes that there are examples of piety,
there are examples of self-control. But through
his questioning he comes to the idea that
there is somehow an underlying, unifying concept
of what these virtues all are. That there
is somehow an idea of courage or an idea of
wisdom, and that these virtues in their individuality
all have some higher ideal concept that's
somehow grounded in wisdom. And in this pursuit
to define what the individual virtues are:
What is courage? What is self-control? We
see the seeds of the teachings of his greatest
student - Plato.
