Virtue
Platonic Dialogues about Virtue
[[Protagoras Dialogue]](socratic virtue against sophists)[[Meno]](can virtue be taught? What is virtue? → ability to acquire good things? ability to rule others?)[[Laches]](what is courage? → Standing firm in battle?, Endurance?)[[Euthydemus]](Virtue and Knowledge)[[Charmides]](What is Temperance? → be calm and quiet?, Minding one's own business?)[[Gorgias]][[The Republic]](What is Justice?)[[Euthyphro]](what is piety? → whatever all gods love? procecuting equally?)
Initial Conceptions of Virtue in Plato's Dialogues
- Some people go with
[[Homer#Virtue according to Homer (excellence)|traditional ideas like of Homer]](Polemarchus in[[The Republic]]): Justice is harming enemies and benefitting friends - Some go with the latest trends (Hippocrates in the
[[Protagoras Dialogue]]):[[Virtue According to Sophists]]
Virtue according to Socrates
- Socrates has arguments that, in one way or another, show that kowldege or wisdom (epistēmē, sophia, etc.) are required for virtue
- He recognizes that all virtues serve us to overcome adversity, bad luck, or deficiencies of nature - which is a function they share with craft (technē) →
[[Apology of Socrates]]→[[Expert vs Non-expert Knowledge]]
Virtue requires Knowledge according to Socrates
Eythydemus 278e-282a:
- We all want to do well and be happy
- What is doing well/happiness? Possessing good things (wealth, health, beauty, honor, virtues, good fortune)
- But good fortune befalls more likely those with knowledge (say sailors, who know navigation are more likey to be lucky)
- Similarly all other good things are not good for a person unless they posses wisdom, and that wisdom is what makes them good
- Why? It is not the possession but the use of such things that benefits a person and in order to benefit one must use these things properly.
- Hence, to be happy, one needs knowledge of how to properly use the usual 'goods'.
Virtue According to Sophists
Protagoras on Virtue in [[Protagoras Dialogue]]
→ [[Socrates questioning Protagoras about the Unity of the Virtues]]
- Protagoras promises to teach his students to be able to deliberate well about private and public affairs. This ability, he thinks will best position them to succesd in life
- He thinks this is largely a matter of learning to reason correctly.
- When he speaks of knowledge of good an d bad, he has in mind knowledge of things that are useful or beneficial in promoting one's goals and aspriations. His teaching enables one to discover these things
- Protagoras thinks virtue is acquired through social conditioning (like language) but the skill or reasoning correctly that he taeches makes one able to translate it effectively into actions and words.
Gorgias
One of the greatest rhetorician of Ancient Greece. Idea that good is convincing people to do what you want them to do.
Socratic Ignorance
He denies knowing what [[good and bad]] is.
Good and bad
What is useful (Protagoras)
Pleasure (Protagoras)
Knowledge/Truth
The fine and the nuoble (to kalon)
Socrates denies that he knows what good and bad is → [[Socratic Ignorance]]