Socrates, the Sophists and Early Greek Philosophy: From Myth to Logos

Socrates and the Sophists: Socrates was critical and combative, and he rejected both skepticism and relativism. He did not deny the human capacity to access knowledge.

Socrates shared with the Sophists a concern for the education of young people.

However, his concern was different, because for him excellence is knowledge. He argued that the claims of the Sophists were absurd: they wanted to teach excellence while asserting that knowledge is impossible. If there is no knowledge, we cannot teach. For this reason, he said that the Sophists wanted to teach despite knowing nothing.

The Pluralists: The Pluralists attempted to reconcile Heraclitus and Parmenides, who were completely opposed to each other.

• What exists did not arise from a single and unique principle.
• The changes we observe are combinations of primordial elements.

Empedocles established the famous theory of the four irreducible principles, which would be the reality that never changes.

Anaxagoras held that there are not just four principles or elements, but many more, as many elements as there are kinds of things.

Leucippus and Democritus were the atomists. They considered that basic reality is made up of an infinity of tiny objects: the atoms.

Heraclitus and Parmenides: Heraclitus and Parmenides are the founders of these two opposing visions.

Heraclitus held the fundamental thesis of the perpetual flow of things: everything passes, everything runs (baby, child, adolescent, young adult, adult, elderly...). Fire is the metaphor that expresses his thought: all things are flames of a great fire.

Parmenides states that being is and non-being is not, that is, being exists and non-being does not exist. Starting from here, Parmenides draws logical consequences, and what is important is the denial of change.

From myth to logos: This is the transition from traditional answers to logical and rational answers. This change in mentality is called the shift from mythos to logos.

Plato:

He had several years of contact with Socrates.

Plato's thought fundamentally consists in defending the existence of the absolute (the Ideas or Forms), as opposed to the corporeal, mortal and relative world.

Unlike Christian thought (which also accepts the absolute, identifying it with God), the absolute to which Plato refers does not have a personal character.

Theory of Ideas

Plato considered that reality is divided into two great genera:

1. The Sensible World (he also frequently uses the expression "visible world").
2. The Intelligible World or World of Ideas.

The Sensible World is the set of entities offered to the senses: particular, changing, multiple realities that are born, last and die, and are perceived with the senses (the interior of the cave).

The Intelligible World or World of Ideas is populated by absolute, universal, independent, eternal and immutable entities: entities that lie beyond time and space, and that are known through the most excellent part of the soul, the rational part (the exterior of the cave).

In this second realm, the most valuable reality is the Idea of the Good.

The Sensible or visible world is the set of everything that presents itself to the senses.

The Intelligible World is the true world.

In the myth of the cave (a metaphor for the intelligible world), it is the outside world that the prisoner accesses when he loses his chains and leaves the cave.