The political and social upheaval caused by the Persian Wars as well as continued strife between Athens and Sparta had at least one unintended consequence. In the 5th century, a flood of new ideas poured into Athens. In general, these new ideas came as a result of an influx of Ionian thinkers into the Attic peninsula. Athens had become the intellectual and artistic center of the Greek world. Furthermore, by the mid-5th century, it had become more common for advanced thinkers to reject traditional explanations of the world of nature. As a result of the experience of a century of war, religious beliefs declined.
Gods and goddesses were no longer held in the same regard as they had been a century earlier. I suppose we could generalize and say that the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars taught that the actions of men and women determine their own destiny, and not “Moira.” Meanwhile, more traditional notions of right and wrong were called into question, and all of this was expressed in Hellenic tragedy and comedy. The Greeks used their creative energies to explain experience by recourse to history, tragedy, comedy, art and architecture. But their creative energies were also used to “invent” philosophy, defined as “the love of wisdom.” In general, philosophy came into existence when the Greeks discovered their dissatisfaction with supernatural and mythical explanations of reality. Over time, Greek thinkers began to suspect that there was a rational or logical order to the universe. Into an atmosphere of change came the traveling teachers, the Sophists. The Sophists were a motley bunch some hailed from the Athenian polis or other city-states, but the majority came from Ionia, in Asia Minor.
The Essay on The Greek Civilization Greece City Athens
The Greek civilization was the first European civilization. At this point in time religion is not prevalent or influential. The European religion was borrowed from the Middle East. There are two main contributions from the Greek civilization. They were politics and secular. Polis the Greek word for city state is where politics came from. They had modern politics with the first democracy. It was ...
The Sophists were men whose responsibility it was to train and educate the sons of Athenian citizens. There were no formal school as we know them today. Instead, these were peripatetic schools, meaning that the instructor would walk with students and talk with them for a fee, of course. The Sophists taught the skills (sophia) of rhetoric and oratory. Both of these arts were essential for the education of the Athenian citizenry. After all, it was the sons of the citizens who would eventually find themselves debating important issues in the Assembly and the Council of Five Hundred.
Rhetoric can be described as the art of composition, while oratory was the art of public speaking. The Sophists abandoned science, philosophy, mathematics and ethics. What they taught was the subtle art of persuasion. A Sophist was a person who could argue eloquently and could prove a position whether that position was correct or incorrect. In other words, what mattered was persuasion and not truth. The Sophists were also relativists.
They believed that there was no such thing as a universal or absolute truth, valid at all times. According to Protagoras (c.485-c.411 B.C.), “Man is the measure of all things.” Everything is relative and there are no values because man, individual man, is the measure of all things. Nothing is good or bad since everything depends on the individual. Gorgias of Leontini (c.485-c.380 B.C.), who visited Athens in 427, was a well-paid teacher of rhetoric and famous for his saying that a man could not know anything. And if he could, he could not describe it and if he could describe it, no one would understand him. The Sophistic movement of the fifth century B.C.
has been the subject of much discussion and there is no single view about their significance. Plato’s treatment of the Sophists in his late dialogue, the Sophist, is hardly flattering. He does not treat them as real seekers after truth but as men whose only concern was making money and teaching their students success in argument by whatever means. Aristotle said that a Sophist was “one who made money by sham wisdom.” At their very best, the Sophists challenged the accepted values of the fifth century. They wanted the freedom to sweep away old conventions as a way of finding a better understanding of the universe, the gods and man. The Sophists have been compared with the philosophes of the 18th century Enlightenment who also used criticism and reason to wipe out anything they deemed was contrary to human reason.
The Essay on Postmodern Theory in Art
Philosophy refers to the search for truth, existence, knowledge and performance through sense and rationale. Philosophy attempts to study the nature of existence, soundness, impartiality, beauty, mind and language. Art on the other hand refers to the process of arranging elements in a creative manner that makes them appealing to the senses and the emotions. Art includes performance which involves ...
Regardless of what we think of the Sophists as a group or individually, they certainly did have the cumulative effect of further degrading a mythical understanding of the universe and of man. From the ranks of the Sophists came Socrates (c.469-399 B.C.), perhaps the most noble and wisest Athenian to have ever lived. He was born sometime in 469, we don’t know for sure. What we do know is that his father was Sophroniscus, a stone cutter, and his mother, Phaenarete, was a midwife. Sophroniscus was a close friend of the son of Aristides the Just (c.550-468 B.C.), and the young Socrates was familiar with members of the circle of Pericles. In his youth he fought as a hoplite at Potidaea (432-429), Delium (424) and Amphipolis (422) during the Peloponnesian Wars. To be sure, his later absorption in philosophy made him neglect his private affairs and he eventually fell to a level of comparative poverty.
He was perhaps more in love with the study of philosophy than with his family — that his wife Xanthippe was shrew is a later tale. In Plato’s dialogue, the Crito, we meet a Socrates concerned with the future of his three sons. Just the same, his entire life was subordinated to “the supreme art of philosophy.” He was a good citizen but held political office only once he was elected to the Council of Five Hundred in 406 B.C. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates remarks that: The true champion if justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone. What we can be sure about Socrates was that he was remarkable for living the life he preached. Taking no fees, Socrates started and dominated an argument wherever the young and intelligent would listen, and people asked his advice on matters of practical conduct and educational problems.
The Essay on Language And Gender Men Women Students
Language and Gender might not seem like the most interesting topic to a high school class, but I am here as a future teacher to show that the differences between the sexes and the way they use language have affected history and continues today to shape the way society thinks and functions. By providing history on gender, language, and giving examples of the differences between the sexes, I feel ...
Socrates was not an attractive man – he was snub-nosed, prematurely bald, and overweight. But, he was strong in body and the intellectual master of every one with whom he came into contact. The Athenian youth flocked to his side as he walked the paths of the agora. They clung to his every word and gesture. He was not a Sophist himself, but a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. In 399 B.C., Socrates was charged with impiety by a jury of five hundred of his fellow citizens. His most famous student, Plato, tells us, that he was charged “as an evil-doer and curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heavens; and making the worse appear the better cause, and teaching all this to others.” He was convicted to death by a margin of six votes.
Oddly enough, the jury offered Socrates the chance to pay a small fine for his impiety. He rejected it. He also rejected the pleas of Plato and other students who had a boat waiting for him at Piraeus that would take him to freedom. But Socrates refused to break the law. What kind of citizen would he be if he refused to accept the judgment of the jury? No citizen at all. He spent his last days with his friends before he drank the fatal dose of hemlock.
The charge made against Socrates – disbelief in the state’s gods – implied un-Athenian activities which would corrupt the young and the state if preached publicly. Meletus, the citizen who brought the indictment, sought precedents in the impiety trials of Pericles’ friends. Although Socrates was neither a heretic nor an agnostic, there was prejudice against him. He also managed to provoke hostility. For instance, the Delphic oracle is said to have told Chaerephon that no man was wiser than Socrates. During his trial Socrates had the audacity to use this as a justification of his examination of the conduct of all Athenians, claiming that in exposing their falsehoods, he had proved the god right – he at least knew that he knew nothing. Although this episode smacks of Socrates’ well-known irony, he clearly did believe that his mission was divinely inspired. Socrates has been described as a gadfly – a first-class pain. The reason why this charge is somewhat justified is that he challenged his students to think for themselves to use their minds to answer questions. He did not reveal answers.
The Essay on Giving The Man Student Spare Mill
TO SPARE OR NOT TO SPARE: THAT IS THE ETHICAL QUESTION Date of Submission: February 11, 2005 by Submitted to: Humanities and Communications Humanities and Communications In Partial Fulfillment Of the RequirementsOfSpring 2005 Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Prescott, Arizona A twenty-something year old Caucasian male engineering student travels from Prescott, Arizona to Friends ville, ...
He did not reveal truth. Many of his questions were, on the surface, quite simple: what is courage? what is virtue? what is duty? But what Socrates discovered, and what he taught his students to discover, was that most people could not answer these fundamental questions to his satisfaction, yet all of them claimed to be courageous, virtuous and dutiful. So, what Socrates knew, was that he knew nothing, upon this sole fact lay the source of his wisdom. Socrates was not necessarily an intelligent man but he was a wise man. And there is a difference between the two. Socrates wrote nothing himself. What we know of him comes from the writings of two of his closest friends, Xenophon and Plato. Although Xenophon (c.430-c.354 B.C.) did write four short portraits of Socrates, it is almost to Plato alone that we know anything of Socrates. Plato (c.427-347 B.C.) came from a family of aristoi, served in the Peloponnesian War, and ….
