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SocratesSocrates was the first of the three great Athenian philosophers (the other two are Plato and Aristotle). Socrates was born in Athens in 469 BC, so he lived through the time of Pericles and the Athenian Empire, though he was too young to remember Marathon or Salamis. He was not from a rich family. His father was probably a stone-carver, and Socrates also worked in stone, especially as a not-very-good sculptor. Socrates' mother was a midwife. When the Peloponnesian War began, Socrates fought bravely for Athens. We do not have any surviving pictures of Socrates that were made while he was alive, or by anyone who ever saw him, but he is supposed to have been ugly. But when Socrates was in his forties or so, he began to feel an urge to think about the world around him, and try to answer some difficult questions. He asked, "What is wisdom?" and "What is beauty?" and "What is the right thing to do?" He knew that these questions were hard to answer, and he thought it would be better to have a lot of people discuss the answers together, so that they might come up with more ideas. So he began to go around Athens asking people he met these questions, "What is wisdom?" , "What is piety?", and so forth. Sometimes the people just said they were busy, but sometimes they would try to answer him. Then Socrates would try to teach them to think better by asking them more questions which showed them the problems in their logic. Often this made people angry. Sometimes they even tried to beat him up.This is what is left of the Painted Stoa, or Porch, where Socrates used to teach, in Athens.Socrates soon had a group of young men who listened to him and learned from him how to think. Plato was one of these young men. Socrates never charged them any money. But in 399 BC, some of the Athenians got mad at Socrates for what he was teaching the young men. They charged him in court with impiety (not respecting the gods) and corrupting the youth (teaching young men bad things). People thought he was against democracy, and he probably was - he thought the smartest people should make the decisions for everyone. The Athenians couldn't charge him with being against democracy, because they had promised not to take revenge on anyone after the Peloponnesian War. So they had to use these vague religious charges instead.Socrates had a big trial in front of an Athenian jury. He was convicted of these charges and sentenced to death, and he died soon afterwards, when the guards gave him a cup of hemlock (a poisonous plant) to drink.Socrates never wrote down any of his ideas while he was alive. But after he died, his student, Plato, did write down some of what Socrates had said. You can read Plato's version of what Socrates said online, or you can buy copies of these conversations as a book (it's only like US $5.00).PLATOPlato is known today as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. He was born about 429 BC, close to the time when Pericles died, and he died in 347 BC, just after the birth of Alexander the Great. Plato was born in Athens, to a very wealthy and aristocratic family. Many of his relatives were involved with Athenian politics, though Plato himself was not. When Plato was a young man, he went to listen to Socrates, and learned a lot from Socrates about how to think, and what sort of questions to think about. When Socrates was killed in 399 BC, Plato was very upset (He was 30 years old when Socrates died) . Plato began to write down some of the conversations he had heard Socrates have. Practically everything we know about Socrates comes from what Plato wrote down.After a while, though, Plato began to write down his own ideas about philosophy instead of just writing down Socrates' ideas. One of his earlier works is the Republic, which describes what Plato thought would be a better form of government than the government of Athens. Plato thought that most people were pretty stupid, and so they should not be voting about what to do. Instead, the best people should be chosen to be the Guardians of the rest. (Remember Plato was from a rich aristocratic family so he probably considered himself among the best people!).Plato also thought a lot about the natural world and how it works. He thought that everything had a sort of ideal form, like the idea of a chair, and then an actual chair was a sort of poor imitation of the ideal chair that exists only in your mind. One of the ways Plato tried to explain his ideas was with the famous metaphor of the cave. He said, Suppose there is a cave, and inside the cave there are some men chained up to a wall, so that they can only see the back wall of the cave and nothing else. These men can't see anything outside of the cave, or even see each other clearly, but they can see shadows of what is going on outside the cave. Wouldn't these prisoners come to think that the shadows were real, and that was what things really looked like? Suppose now that one of the men escaped, and got out of the cave, and saw what real people looked like, and real trees and grass. If he went back to the cave and told the other men what he had seen, would they believe him, or would they think he was crazy? Plato says that we are like those men sitting in the cave: we think we understand the real world, but because we are trapped in our bodies we can see only the shadows on the wall. One of his goals is to help us understand the real world better, by finding ways to predict or understand the real world even without being able to see it.AristotleAristotle's father was Nicomachus, a doctor who lived near Macedon, in the north of Greece. So unlike Socrates and Plato, Aristotle was not originally from Athens. He was not from a rich family like Plato, though his father was not poor either. When Aristotle was a young man, about 350 BC, he went to study at Plato's Academy. Plato was already pretty old then. Aristotle did very well at the Academy. But he never got to be among its leaders, and when Plato died, the leaders chose someone else instead of Aristotle to lead the Academy. Probably Aristotle was pretty upset about this. Soon afterwards, Aristotle left Athens and went to Macedon to be the tutor of the young prince Alexander, who grew up to be Alexander the Great. As far as we can tell, Alexander was not much interested in learning anything from Aristotle, but they did become friends. When Alexander grew up and became king, Aristotle went back to Athens and opened his own school there, the Lyceum (lie-SAY-um), in competition with Plato's Academy. Both schools were successful for hundreds of years.?Doodle4GoogleAds by GoogleAristotle was more interested in science than Socrates or Plato, maybe because his father was a doctor. He wanted to use Socrates' logical methods to figure out how the real world worked; therefore Aristotle is really the father of today's scientific method. Aristotle was especially interested in biology, in classifying plants and animals in a way that would make sense. This is part of the Greek impulse to make order out of chaos: to take the chaotic natural world and impose a man-made order on it. When Alexander was traveling all over Western Asia, he had his messengers bring strange plants back to Aristotle for his studies. Aristotle also made efforts to create order in peoples' governments. He created a classification system of monarchies, oligarchies, tyrannies, democracies and republics which we still use today.When Alexander died in 323 BC, though, there were revolts against Macedonian rule in Athens. People accused Aristotle of being secretly on the side of the Macedonians (and maybe he was; he was certainly, like Plato, no democrat). He left town quickly, and spent the last years of his life back in the north again where he had been born. ................
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