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Platão EN
Platos mother was Perictíone, whose family boasted of a relationship with the famous Athenian lawmaker and lyric poet Solon.
Sócrates EN
Socrates lived in Athens, between the years 470 and 399 B.C.
Socrates
Considering himself a midwife of ideas, Socrates claimed to make people think for themselves.
Socrates lived in Athens, between the years 470 and 399 B.C. The Greek thinker marked the production of his time, having introduced in it, for the first time, questions relating only to the human being and his coexistence in society.
Of humble origin, the philosopher was the son of a craftsman and a midwife. In his youth, he even exercised his fathers profession. He also participated in military campaigns, having fought in the Peloponnesian War, around 431 BC, in which he proved to be a brave, fair and highly resistant soldier.
Having changed the course of philosophy of his period, before the cosmological tradition, Socrates began the Anthropological Period of Ancient Philosophy. From Socrates onwards, philosophy began to dedicate itself to entirely human issues, focused on rational knowledge and on issues resulting from human action, such as politics, morals and justice.
While still young, Socrates would have visited the temple of Apollo, in Athens, a fact that marked him doubly, because:
The inscription engraved on the porch contained the phrase "know yourself and you will know the universe and the gods" and inspired the philosopher to seek his self-knowledge and disseminate this idea throughout Athens. According to the thinker, self-knowledge would be the first step towards a full life and an authentic philosophy.
Known for the modest phrase “I only know that I know nothing”, the philosopher was considered by the oracle of Delphi to be the wisest of Greeks. This fact was interpreted by Socrates as an important mission that he was supposed to spread around Athens, talking to people. The thinker started to consider himself a “loquacious vagabond”, because he wandered through Athens talking to people in an attempt to remove knowledge from themselves.
Everything that is known about Socrates philosophy today has been extracted from the writings about him and, mainly, from the Platonic dialogues, which, for the most part, Socrates appears as the main character.
Socratic method (Irony and Maiutics)
The philosopher, proclaimed as the wisest of men by the oracle, understood that he himself taught nothing to anyone. He just made people think for themselves. With his method, he induced people to recognize their own ignorance and to formulate their own ideas.
Socrates considered himself a kind of “midwife of ideas”, as he did not create new ideas, he just removed them from peoples minds. His role was, according to himself, to always dialogue and question, never accepting prior knowledge as an indisputable truth without first analyzing and criticizing what was said.
We can say that the method of Socratic dialogue is summarized in two steps:
Maieutics - a way of asking successive questions on the same subject, in order to arrive at a concept or definition of something.
Irony - a way of showing the interlocutor that the answer, which the person believed to be correct, was, in fact, a mistake.
With his method, the thinker thought he took the ability to think on his own and question the knowledge established to the Athenian people, establishing a new way to proceed philosophically and to fight the relativism of opinions.
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Aristóteles EN
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) was an important Greek philosopher.