Reflecting on Socrates & Plato's Life

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Dear Student,
I enjoyed writing this solution for you. Prior to reading and using this solution I have written, I hope that you have already viewed the videos whose links you indicated with your post because much of the discussion I delved into in this essay solution is based from there. I also found the related videos on Socrates, Plato and Aristotle very interesting. The solution is written and APA format and since my discussion took in related ideas and philosophies from the past and immediate present, I have included a Reference section from which you can expand added ideas I have used. I also encourage you to read up a little about the life and times of these great philosophers as well as their contemporaries. Their ideas rose from their experience of a particular society and it would be to your great advantage to be able to situate them in history because then you can see how they have come about that idea by understanding what influenced them. I hope that this solution will help you in your studies. Good luck & thank you for using brainmass. The word version of this solution is attached for easy printing.

Sincerely,

OTA 105878/Xenia Jones
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Note:
The following essay is a reaction to the narrative & ideas presented in the following videos on Philosophy that can be found here:
http://videos.howstuffworks.com/hsw/25880-ancient-greece-socrates-and-plato-video.htm
http://videos.howstuffworks.com/hsw/19938-great-books-platos-republic-video.htm

Situating Socrates, Plato & Aristotle

Socrates lived in a period of human civilization that gave rise to the kind of world we know today, that of free will and choices guided by logic. While this was not practiced by all Athenians, Socratic thinking influenced much of Athenians seeking to understand the world then by asking questions that irritated and ultimately enlightened. Sociologically speaking, the Socratic Method is about justified & logical discourse in a society that practices democracy, the kind that we know today. Philosophy by etymology stems from the Greek word philosophia which literally means love of knowledge. In the ancient world, in Greece, Rome, Europe in the Middle Ages and even in the Far East, people referred to the learned of their men as 'Philosophers', he who seeks to know. For instance, in ancient China, Confucius established a philosophy that provides a perspective of wisdom as to how and why life should be lived in a certain manner. History has taught us that Plato's work was translated and kept as an essential book of knowledge by the Arab-philosophers who made it available to the societies and civilizations they have come to encounter until, finally, through the exchange of ideas via economic trade, the work and manner of thinking of Socrates, Plato & Aristotle returned once more to then Imperial Rome. It is of no surprise then that perhaps Confucius came across the echoes of the ideas of Socrates and Plato in this manner. It is after the Mongols who also came to rule over China who decimated Baghdad in the year 1258 and took Aleppo & Damascus 2 years later. Interestingly, in Confucius' mind, the King, considered moral and the center of social order must display philosophic insight and qualities for the purpose of enlightenment to be the fount of wisdom, ethics and morality in his kingdom. These insights echo throughout the work attributed to Confucius, the Analects.

Socrates considered himself the gadfly sent by the gods to Athens to spur man to examine life and to ask questions that make man look deeper into the meaning of it all. What is justice? What is love? What is right? What is wrong? What is moral? These were just among the many questions that he kept on asking, or rather served up to people to ask themselves. In this manner, he spurred 'his students', those who came to listen to him to gain 'wisdom' to look at reality with a different set of eyes. Such was his influence on one of his most outstanding students, Plato, who later on through Socrates influence became the founder of Philosophy, the critical science of thinking as we know it through his work 'The Republic'. At Socrates' and Plato's time, the Peloponnesian War raged on between Sparta & Athens. Athens was led by the General & Politician Pericles who history sees as one of Antiquity's leading figures in terms of establishing the essence of Democracy and establishing social order by putting together a society bund by identity and the practice of free will. This was also the period of Thucydides, the Athenian general who established the practice of chronology in writing his historic record of the 'Peloponnesian ...