PLATO

THE PHILOSOPHER KING

“Good people do not need laws to tell them to

act responsibly, while bad people will find a
way around the laws”
Plato (427-347 BCE)
• Is one of the worlds best known and most
widely read and studied philosophers. He
was the student of Socrates and the
teacher of Aristotle, and he wrote in the
middle of the 4th century BCE in ancient
Greece.
Relativism of sophists
The Greek word sophistes, formed from the
noun sophia, ‘wisdom’ or ‘learning’, has the
general sense ‘one who exercises wisdom or
learning’.
Sophist, any of certain Greek lecturers,
writers,and teachers in the 5th and 4th
centuries BCE, most of whom travelled about
the Greeks speaking world giving instruction
in a wide range of subjects in return for fees.
During the 5th and 6th centuries BCE Athens
was the cultural centre of Greece
• Materially successful
• Huge political influence
• Artistically creative
• Philosophical thought was changing.

A group of thinkers emerged at this time

THE SOPHISTS
THE SOPHISTS
• Intellectuals
• teachers
-rhetoric, language, statesmanship, excellence,
and virtues
• claimed they knew all the answers
• concerned with the person and the
persons place in the world
– charged highly for their services
– employed by higher classes.
 PROTAGORAS
• Born in 480 BCE
• One of the first sophists
• believed it was not possible to know the
truth
• he said truth was a matter for the
individual
– what is true for me may not be tue to you
– but both positions are valid
'MAN IS THE MEASURE OF ALL
THINGS'
THEORY OF RELATIVITY
• The sophists believed other concepts of
truth and justice were products of habit
and circumtances
– created by those in power to suit their
interests.

'JUSTICE IS SIMPLY THE INTEREST OF

THE STRONGER'
• He who argues best wins.
• He who proves the opposition flawed
holds the upper hand.
Sophists appealed to the politically
ambitious younger generation
• Wanted to learn the power of persuasion
through rhetoric
• Learned debating and public speaking
• Learned to argue both sides of an
argument with equal conviction
despite their own view
• Ability to pursuade the audience of the
truth of your position became the most
important thing
The truth itself could be hidden.
The theory of forms
• Reperesents platos attempts to cultivate
our capacity for abstract. Philosophy was
relatively new platos day, and it completed
with mythology, tragedy and epic poetry as
the primary means for which people could
make sense of their place in the world.
• It differentiates the abstract world of though
from the world of the senses, where art and
mythology operate.
 Tripatrite soul
The appetites
includes all the myriad desires for various
pleasures, comforts, physical, satisfaction
and bodily ease.

THE BLACK HORSE

-belly and genitals
 Tripatrite soul
The spirited or hot blooded
the part that gets angry when it perceives
for example an injustice one. This is the part
of us that loves to face and overcome great
challenges, the part that can steel itself To
adversity, and that loves victory, winning,
challenge and honor.

THE WHITE HORSE

-the heart
 Tripatrite soul
The mind
our conscious awareness is represented
by the charioteer who is guiding or who at
least should be guiding the horses and the
chariot. This is the part of us that thinks,
analyzes, looks ahead, rationally weighs
options and tries to gauge what is best and
truest overall.
THE CHARIOT
-the head
Education for the health of state
• In both the republic and the laws, plato
identifies education as one of the most
important aspects of a healthy state.
• Plato thinks that a childs education is the last
thing that should be left to chance or parental
whim since the young mind is so easily molded.
• Plato apparently considered most of his fellow
athenians to be hopelessly corupt, easily
inflamed by hollow rhetoric and seduce by easy
pleasures.