THE ATHENS OF SOCRATES
and SOCRATES
Anaxagoras’ account of the origin of the world is strikingly similar to a model which is popular today. At the beginning, he said, ‘all things were together’, in a unit infinitely complex and infinitely small which lacked all perceptible
qualities
The most famous of the sophists was Protagoras of Abdera, who visitedAthens several times during the mid-fifth century, and was employed by Pericles to draw up a constitution for an Athenian colony. He was more a humanist than a theist: ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ ran his most famous saying, ‘both of things that are that they are, and of things that are not that they are not.’
Another sophist, Gorgias of Leontini, had been a pupil of Empedocles. He was first and foremost a teacher of rhetoric, whose essays on the polishing of style influenced the history of Greek oratory. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 pp22-24.)
Socrates
Socrates’ importance in the development of philosophy is such that all the philosophers we have considered hitherto are lumped together by historians under the title ‘Pre-Socratics’. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 pp.25.)
According to Socrates moral knowledge and virtue were one and the same thing. Someone who really knew what it was right to do could not do wrong; if anyone did what was wrong, it must be because he did not know what was right. No one goes wrong on purpose, since everyone wants to lead a good life and thus be happy. Those who do wrong
unintentionally are in need of instruction, not punishment. This remarkable set of doctrines is sometimes called by historians ‘The
Socratic Paradox’. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 pp.26.)
