Greek Philosophers

There are three Greek philosophers that are most known today. You have Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The least known would be Socrates. Plato is known to have a great impact on today’s politics and systems. Aristotle of course is known as the philosopher who tutored Alexander the great.

Nobody knows the true history of Socrates. There are three different stories. One of them is written by Plato. According to the book, Plato has four ways of describing Socrates. The Characterization of Socrates is one of them. Socrates is predominantly characterized, not as a teacher, but as an enquirer. He disclaims wisdom, and seeks, normally in vain, elucidation of problematic questions from his interlocutors. Then you have The Definition, which is saying that many of the dialogues are concerned with the attempt to find a virtue or ethically significant concept. Five of his dialogues are Euthyphro, Charmides, Laches, Hippias Major, and Protagoras. The Ethics, where it tells you how all the dialogues has to do with ethics. Finally, The Sophists tells you how in several of these dialogues, the topic is pursued via the portrayal of a confrontation between Socrates on the one hand and various sophists and/or their pupils and associates on the other. These dialogues thereby develop the apologetic project enunciated in the Apology.

Plato was born 427 B.C into an upper class Athenian family, and lived to be eighty. He would have been old enough to witness with young and impressionable eyes the last scenes of a tragedy, the decline and fall of the Athenian Empire. And he lived long enough to see the first beginnings of an empire of a very different sort, that of Philip of Macedon, whose son Alexander conquered a large part of the known world. Since nothing of Plato’s work remains, and the stories about are all suspect, it is even more difficult than usual to sieve out his ideas from those of his later disciples, with whom Plato was acquainted.

Plato has a greater claim than anybody else to be called the founder of philosophy as we know it. Plato had succeeded in distinguishing from each other the four different types of explanation questions which were duly classified by Aristotle on his doctrine of the four causes. They are “The material cause, or explanation of the material constitution of a thing, The efficient cause, or cause in the narrower modern sense, which made a thing do what it did, The formal cause, or explanation of its form- of what it is to be that kind of thing, and The final cause, or explanation of the purpose for which something comes from to be as it is.

Aristotle died in the autumn of 322BC. He was sixty-two and at the height of his powers. He was a teacher who inspired and continues to inspire to generations of people. No man before him had contributed so much to learning