Download or read book Socrates and Self Knowledge written by Christopher Moore and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-09 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first systematic study of Socrates' interest in selfhood, examining ancient philosophical ideas of what constitutes the self.
Download or read book Socrates on Self Improvement written by Nicholas D. Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-07 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how and why Socrates continues to be a foundational figure in western philosophy.
Download or read book Know Thyself written by Mitchell S. Green and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Know Thyself: The Value and Limits of Self-Knowledge takes the reader on tour of the nature, value, and limits of self-knowledge. Mitchell S. Green calls on classical sources like Plato and Descartes, 20th-century thinkers like Freud, recent developments in neuroscience and experimental psychology, and even Buddhist philosophy to explore topics at the heart of who we are. The result is an unvarnished look at both the achievements and drawbacks of the many attempts to better know one’s own self. Key topics in this volume include: Knowledge – what it means to know, the link between wisdom and knowledge, and the value of living an "examined life" Personal identity – questions of dualism (the idea that our mind is not only our brain), bodily continuity, and personhood The unconscious — including the kind posited by psychoanalysis as well as the form proposed by recent research on the so-called adaptive unconscious Free will – if we have it, and the recent arguments from neuroscience challenging it Self-misleading – the ways we willfully deceive ourselves, and how this relates to empathy, peer disagreement, implicit bias, and intellectual humility Experimental psychology – considerations on the automaticity of emotion and other cognitive processes, and how they shape us This book is designed to be used in conjunction with the free ‘Know Thyself’ MOOC (massive open online course) created through collaboration of the University of Connecticut's Project on Humility and Conviction in Public Life, and the University of Edinburgh’s Eidyn research centre, and hosted on the Coursera platform (https://www.coursera.org/learn/know-thyself). The book is also suitable as a text for interdisciplinary courses in the philosophy of mind or self-knowledge, and is highly recommended for anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating topic.
Download or read book Socrates on Friendship and Community written by Mary P. Nichols and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Socrates on Friendship and Community, Mary P. Nichols addresses Kierkegaard's and Nietzsche's criticism of Socrates and recovers the place of friendship and community in Socratic philosophizing. This approach stands in contrast to the modern philosophical tradition, in which Plato's Socrates has been viewed as an alienating influence on Western thought and life. Nichols' rich analysis of both dramatic details and philosophic themes in Plato's Symposium, Phaedras, and Lysis shows how love finds its fulfilment in the reciprocal relation of friends. Nichols also shows how friends experience another as their own and themselves as belonging to another. Their experience, she argues, both sheds light on the nature of philosophy and serves as a standard for a political life that does justice to human freedom and community.
Download or read book Descent of Socrates written by Peter Warnek and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2005-12-21 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the appearance of Plato's Dialogues, philosophers have been preoccupied with the identity of Socrates and have maintained that successful interpretation of the work hinges upon a clear understanding of what thoughts and ideas can be attributed to him. In Descent of Socrates, Peter Warnek offers a new interpretation of Plato by considering the appearance of Socrates within Plato's work as a philosophical question. Warnek reads the Dialogues as an inquiry into the nature of Socrates and in doing so opens up the relationship between humankind and the natural world. Here, Socrates appears as a demonic and tragic figure whose obsession with the task of self-knowledge transforms the history of philosophy. In this uncompromising work, Warnek reveals the importance of the concept of nature in the Platonic Dialogues in light of Socratic practice and the Ancient ideas that inspire contemporary philosophy.
Download or read book Ancient Self Refutation written by Luca Castagnoli and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-30 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book-length treatment provides a unified account of what is distinctive in the ancient approach to the self-refutation argument.
Download or read book Profound Ignorance written by David Lawrence Levine and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-10-30 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Returning from the battle of Potidaea, Socrates reenters the city only to find it changed, with new leadership in the making. Socrates assumes the mask of physician in order to diagnose the city’s condition in the persons of the young and charismatic Charmides and his ambitious and formidable guardian Critias. Beneath the cloak of their self-presentations, Doctor Socrates discovers a profound and communicable disease: their incipient tyranny, “the greatest sickness of the soul.” He thereby is able to “foresee” their future and their role in the oligarchy (The Thirty Tyrants) that overthrows the democracy at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The unusual diagnostic instrument of this physician of the city: the question of sophrosyne (customarily translated as moderation). The analysis of the soul of this popular favorite uncovers a distorted development with little prospect of self-knowledge, and that of the guardian, a profound disabling ignorance, deluded and perverted by his presumed practical wisdom. Alongside on the bench sits Socrates whose ignorance, by contrast, shows itself to be enabling, measured and prospective. In this way, the profound ignorance of the tyrant and the profound ignorance of the philosopher are made to mutually illuminate one another. In the process, Levine brings us to see Plato’s extended apologia or defense of Socrates as “a teacher of tyrants” and his counter-indictment of the city for its unthinking acceptance of its leaders. Moreover, in the face of modern skepticism, we are brought to see how such “value judgments” are possible, how Plato conceives the prospects for practical judgment (phronȇsis). In addition we witness the care with which Plato presents his penetrating diagnoses even amidst compromised circumstances. Levine, further, is at pains to situate the specific dialogic issues in their larger significance for the philosophic tradition. Lastly, the author’s inviting style encourages the reader to think along with Socrates. The question of tyranny is always relevant. The question of our ignorance is always immediate. The conversation about sophrosyne needs to be resumed.
Download or read book Rescuing Socrates written by Roosevelt Montas and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-03-21 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life—and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities. Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors—Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi—had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education—and why it can still remake lives.
Download or read book LoveKnowledge written by Roy Brand and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its inception, philosophy has struggled to perfect individual understanding through discussion and dialogue based in personal, poetic, or dramatic investigation. The positions of such philosophers as Socrates, Spinoza, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Foucault, and Derrida differ in almost every respect, yet these thinkers all share a common method of practicing philosophy--not as a detached, intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art. What is the love that turns into knowledge and how is the knowledge we seek already a form of love? Reading key texts from Socrates to Derrida, this book addresses the fundamental tension between love and knowledge that informs the history of Western philosophy. LoveKnowledge returns to the long tradition of philosophy as an exercise not only of the mind but also of the soul, asking whether philosophy can shape and inform our lives and communities.
Download or read book Authority and Estrangement written by Richard Moran and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001-11-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since Socrates, and through Descartes to the present day, the problems of self-knowledge have been central to philosophy's understanding of itself. Today the idea of ''first-person authority''--the claim of a distinctive relation each person has toward his or her own mental life--has been challenged from a number of directions, to the point where many doubt the person bears any distinctive relation to his or her own mental life, let alone a privileged one. In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran argues for a reconception of the first-person and its claims. Indeed, he writes, a more thorough repudiation of the idea of privileged inner observation leads to a deeper appreciation of the systematic differences between self-knowledge and the knowledge of others, differences that are both irreducible and constitutive of the very concept and life of the person. Masterfully blending philosophy of mind and moral psychology, Moran develops a view of self-knowledge that concentrates on the self as agent rather than spectator. He argues that while each person does speak for his own thought and feeling with a distinctive authority, that very authority is tied just as much to the disprivileging of the first-person, to its specific possibilities of alienation. Drawing on certain themes from Wittgenstein, Sartre, and others, the book explores the extent to which what we say about ourselves is a matter of discovery or of creation, the difficulties and limitations in being ''objective'' toward ourselves, and the conflicting demands of realism about oneself and responsibility for oneself. What emerges is a strikingly original and psychologically nuanced exploration of the contrasting ideals of relations to oneself and relations to others.
Download or read book Personal Socrates written by Baronfig and published by . This book was released on 2021-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore questions that stimulate your mental fitness and teach you how to direct your internal narrative to work for you.Inspired by Socrates himself, Marc Champagne draws on his interviews with award-winning writers, designers, photographers, strategists, entrepreneurs, technologists, musicians, athletes, and more to provide inspiration and examples as to where and how pointed self-inquiry can help your health, happiness, and performance. Readers are guided by powerful reflective questions that can be easily applied to daily life and work for incredible results.The prompts and mental fitness practices detailed throughout Personal Socrates are like having your very own mental fitness coach with you at all times-one who can be used to bring clarity, intentionality, and possibility to every aspect of your life.
Download or read book Self Constitution written by Christine M. Korsgaard and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2009 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christine M. Korsgaard presents an account of the foundation of practical reason and moral obligation, based on a new theory of action and interaction. She proposes that the function of an action is to constitute the agency and therefore the identity of the person who does it, and that only morally good action can serve this function. -;Christine M. Korsgaard presents an account of the foundation of practical reason and moral obligation. Moral philosophy aspires to understand the fact that human actions, unlike the actions of the other animals, can be morally good or bad, right or wrong. Few moral philosophers, however, have exploited the idea that actions might be morally good or bad in virtue of being good or bad of their kind - good or bad as actions. Just as we need to know that it is the function of the. heart to pump blood to know that a good heart is one that pumps blood successfully, so we need to know what the function of an action is in order to know what counts as a good or bad action. Drawing on the work of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, Korsgaard proposes that the function of an action is to. constitute the agency and therefore the identity of the person who does it. As rational beings, we are aware of, and therefore in control of, the principles that govern our actions. A good action is one that constitutes its agent as the autonomous and efficacious cause of her own movements. These properties correspond, respectively, to Kant's two imperatives of practical reason. Conformity to the categorical imperative renders us autonomous, and conformity to the hypothetical imperative. renders us efficacious. And in determining what effects we will have in the world, we are at the same time determining our own identities. Korsgaard develops a theory of action and of interaction, and of the form interaction must take if we are to have the integrity that, she argues, is essential for. agency. On the basis of that theory, she argues that only morally good action can serve the function of action, which is self-constitution. -
Download or read book Self knowledge in Plato s Phaedrus written by Charles L. Griswold and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this award-winning study of the Phaedrus, Charles Griswold focuses on the theme of "self-knowledge". Relying on the principle that form and content are equally important to the dialogue's meaning, Griswold shows how the concept of self-knowledge unifies the profusion of issues set forth by Plato. Included are a new preface and an updated comprehensive bibliography of works on the Phaedrus.
Download or read book Apology written by Plato Plato and published by Xist Publishing. This book was released on 2016-03-17 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato's Guide to the Good Life “The unexamined life is not worth living” -Apology, Plato An original account of the speech Socrates makes at the trial in which he is charged with not recognizing the gods recognized by the state, inventing new deities, and corrupting the youth of Athens. This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you’ll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can’t wait to hear what you have to say about it. Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes
Download or read book Socrates written by Luis E. Navia and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2009-12-02 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosopher Luis E. Navia presents a compelling portrayal of Socrates in this very readable and well-researched book, which is both a biography of the man and an exploration of his ideas.
Download or read book An Image of the Soul in Speech written by David N. McNeill and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates what Nietzsche called the "problem of Socrates," as that problem manifests itself in Plato's work. In particular, the book demonstrates how Socrates' own confrontation with this problem is the key to understanding the distinctively mimetic, dialogic, and reflexive character of Socratic philosophy.
Download or read book Socrates in the Cave written by Paul J. Diduch and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses the problem of fully explaining Socrates’ motives for philosophic interlocution in Plato’s dialogues. Why, for instance, does Socrates talk to many philosophically immature and seemingly incapable interlocutors? Are his motives in these cases moral, prudential, erotic, pedagogic, or intellectual? In any one case, can Socrates’ reasons for engaging an unlikely interlocutor be explained fully on the grounds of intellectual self-interest (i.e., the promise of advancing his own wisdom)? Or does his activity, including his self-presentation and staging of his death, require additional motives for adequate explanation? Finally, how, if at all, does our conception of Socrates’ motives help illuminate our understanding of the life of reason as Plato presents it? By inviting a multitude of authors to contribute their thoughts on these question—all of whom share a commitment to close reading, but by no means agree on the meaning of Plato’s dialogues—this book provides the reader with an excellent map of the terrain of these problems and aims to help the student of Plato clarify the tensions involved, showing especially how each major stance on Socrates entails problematic assumptions that prompt further critical reflection.
