Philosophy: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (video) | Khan Academy (2024)

Video transcript

- [Instructor] Ancient Greece was not even a cohesive empire. It was made up of many city states, led by Athens and Sparta. But, despite its fragmentation,it's made innumerable contributions to, notjust Western civilization, but civilization as a whole. And those are contributions in terms of forms of governance, like democracy, contributions in medicine,contributions in the arts, in mathematics, in the sciences. But perhaps their most famous contribution is in terms of philosophy. And if we're going totalk about philosophy in ancient Greece, the mostfamous three philosophers are Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Now, before we get into the first of them, and really the teacher of Plato, who was then the teacher of Aristotle, let's get a little bit ofcontext on this time period. So, as we enter intothe fifth century BCE, a couple of things are emerging. First, you have a new Athenian democracy. Then, as you get into thatcentury, the Persians invade, try to conquer Greece severaltimes, but unsuccessfully. But then, the Greeks startfighting amongst themselves, led on one side by Athens,on the other side by Sparta, and that's the PeloponnesianWar, which ends with Sparta being victorious, butall of the Greek city states being weakened dramatically. Now, between the end,especially the first part of the Greco-PersianWars, and the end of the Peloponnesian War, itwas actually a time of Athenian prosperity. They were leading this semi-empire, they were investing in the arts, and it's often calledthe Golden Age of Athens, and that's the world inwhich Socrates emerged. Like many philosophers,Socrates led a very interesting life, and it's worth noting what we know about himdoes not come directly from his writing. We don't have survivingaccounts of his writing. It comes mainly through thewriting of his students, Xenophon, and, most notably, Plato. We also get some parody ofSocrates from Aristophanes, that Socrates himselfdid not appreciate much. But what we know isthat he started in life, he was a stone mason, he even acted as a soldier, a hoplite, during the Peloponnesian War. But he is, of course, mostfamous for being a philosopher and for being a teacher. And his teaching style,the Socratic method, is still viewed as somethingof a best practice today. Rather than lecturingstudents, to, instead, ask incisive questions thatforce a student to deepen their thinking and get closerto the root of an issue, and to learn how to thinkrather than just having knowledge transmitted to them. Now, what's also notable about Socrates and his many students,including Plato and Aristotle, is that they took a departureof how to think about the world from most of the ancient world. Most of the ancient worldwas focused on the gods and the metaphysicalexplaining everything. And, while the ancient Greeksdid have a large pantheon of gods, Socrates andhis fellow philosophers tried to figure out how the world works, why we are here, somewhatindependent of the gods. They tried to reason it through, they tried to talk itthrough, think about it from a rational point of view. And to get a flavor ofthat, here is a quote. "True wisdom comes toeach of us when we realize "how little we understandabout life, ourselves, "and the world around us." So, unlike many ancientsocieties that just tried to explain everythingthrough the metaphysical or through the gods, hereyou have Socrates saying, no, an ideal true wisdom is when you appreciate how little we know, this form of intellectual humility. Now, Socrates lived duringthis Golden Age of Athens, a time when democracy wasflourishing, the Age of Pericles. But he himself was a little bit skeptical of unfettered or pure democracy. He was worried, well,what if the people voting aren't educated to makethe types of decisions? Maybe they can bemanipulated by a demagogue, someone who just tells 'emexactly what they want to hear. And so he was a bit ofa controversial figure, especially as you get to theend of the Peloponnesian War. Remember, Athens losesthe Peloponnesian War. It went from being this powerfulhead of this Delian League, something of an empire, this wealthy city, and now it's a subjugatedstate, it's tired from war. And so you can imagine there's a lot of political infighting, andSocrates ends up being one of the casualties. He is actually put on trialby his fellow Athenians. This is a depiction ofthe trial of Socrates, and it shows Socrates defending himself from the accusations brought against him. Refusing to recognize the godsacknowledged by the state, importing strange divinities of his own, corrupting the young. And his defense, which bothXenophon and Plato write about, called The Apology, he'sbewildered, he says, where is all of this coming from? Now, it is true, hedid not invoke the gods when he's trying to explain the universe. And, yes, he was trying toteach the young to think. But by no means, if youlook at what he was doing, or at least our modernaccounts coming through Plato and Xenophon, does itseem like he was trying to undermine the state in some way. But, needless to say, it comes to a vote, and maybe he's a victim of his own fears of a pure democratic process, but, amongst the 500 Athenians voting, 280 say that he is guilty, and 220 say that he is not guilty. He is given a chance to think about what his penalty should be. And the charges, at leastin the Athenian's minds, were quite serious. But Socrates famously says, "An unexamined life is not worth living." And so, even though manyhistorians think that he might have been able toget exile if he asked for it, he was sentenced to death. And this is a paintingdone much, much later of what that death of Socratesmight have looked like. But you see here Socrates aboutto, or maybe he just drank the hemlock, which is thepoison which will kill him. So, even though he had todie for these pretty spurious allegations, his legacy lives on, and it lives on most famouslyin his student Plato. Now, Plato is famous for many things. There's this notion of aPlatonic ideal form that, whether you're talking about a circle, or a ball, or a dog, or a chair, that there's an idealform that is independent of what your senses are telling you, or what the chair infront of you might be, that that's an imperfectversion of that ideal form. The word Platonic, ingeneral, you'll hear applied to many different concepts,some of the meanings having changed over time. The other thing that Plato is famous for is the notion of an academy. The place where he taught his students was a little field outsidethe walls of Athens, named for the Athenian hero Akademos, and so that area becameknown as Plato's Academy. And ever since then, placesof learning have often been referred to as academies,just like Khan Academy. But Plato was also concerned,like his teacher Socrates, with the nature of how we should be ruled. "There will be no end tothe troubles of states, "or indeed of humanityitself, till philosophers "become rulers in thisworld, or till those "we now call kings andrulers really and truly "become philosophers, andpolitical power and philosophy "thus come into the same hands." So, like Socrates, he's weary of how they have been governed. And, remember, we're now after the period of the Peloponnesian War. The city states ofGreece, especially Athens, have been dramaticallyweakened, so a lot of people might be thinking, including Plato, is there a better way to govern ourselves? Now, Plato's most famousstudent is Aristotle. And, like his teacher, Aristotleis famous for many things and explored manydimensions of the universe. But he is probably mostfamous for being the tutor of Alexander the Great whenAlexander the Great was young. Phillip of Macedon,Alexander the Great's father, as he conquers the weakened city states after the Peloponnesian War, he also conquers Aristotle'shome town of Stagira, and he enslaves the population. And so, when he goes toAristotle to tutor his young son, who ends up being calledAlexander the Great eventually, Aristotle says, okay, my fee will be free the people of my town. His town is freed, hetutors a young Alexander, when Alexander is in his early teens, and he also gets supportfor a center of learning. He creates a Lyceum,which is his version of Plato's Academy. And, just like you saw withSocrates and you see with Plato, Aristotle continued thistradition of a focus on learning and a humble acceptanceof all that there might be in the world, thisrationality that we now see in modern science, that you didn't see from a lot of the ancients, who were focused on themetaphysics and the gods. "It is the mark of an educated mind "to be able to entertain athought without accepting it." And I'll leave you there,but the big takeaway is, going from Socrates,to Plato, to Aristotle, and there were manyother Greek philosophers, you have the seed of what youcould call modern rationality. Roughly 2,000 years later, youhave the European Renaissance that starts reemergingmany of these same ideas, all the way providing abridge into the Enlightenment, and now our modern, hopefullyfairly rational view of the world.