Socrates (469 BC - 399 BC)
-Greek philosopher in Athens



~Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.


~Envy is the ulcer of the soul.


~Get not your friends by bare compliments, but by giving them sensible tokens of your love.


~Remember what is unbecoming to do is also unbecoming to speak of.


~The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.


~I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.


~There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.


~I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.


~The unexamined life is not worth living for man.


~The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways--I to die and you to live. Which is the better, only God knows.

-Proposed that the essence of beauty was order, proportion and limit.
-He claimed to be a 'midwife of thought,' one who merely helped others give birth to their ideas.
-His concern was with ethics, the science which treats of the nature and grounds of moral obligation; moral philosophy, which teaches men their duty and the reasons of it.
-His goal was to help others lead the virtuous life, which comes about through knowledge.
-He asked his students questions that seemingly led them step by step to discover the truth of themselves.
- This technicque, known as dialectic, and was first used by Zeno.
-Knowledge is recollection; we learn not from experience but from reasoning., which leads us to discover knowledge that exists within us ('to educate' comes from the Latin meaning 'to lead out').
-Sometimes Socrates asks for definitions and then leads his partner into contradictions until the definition is reshaped.
-Sometimes he asks for or offers examples, from which his partner finally makes a generalization.
-Sometimes he leads his partner, step by step, to a conclusion that contradicts one he previously stated, or to a conclusion he had not known was implicit in his beliefs.
-Socrates cites geometry as the ideal model of this process. One starts with self-evident axioms and, by hypothesis and deduction, discovers other truths in what one already knew.
-Knowledge exists within us and needs only to be recovered through correct reasoning.
-He held that the existence of innate knowledge, revealed by the dialectic method of instruction, proved that we posses an immortal soul.