Matthew Gates 2m 447 #socrates
The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.
A Look Into Socrates Philosophy
The unexamined life is not worth living.
The more accurate statement that resonates with society today, as it did then is this:
The un-examined life is worth not living.
Was the famous quote of Socrates altered?
If we change the wording, we give the entire sentence new meaning.
The first one pertains to learning, knowledge, analyzing, and thinking, yet we are not or just barely doing it.
We are more adept to a life of living the famous statement of Socrates, but the second statement: What are we when we’re not thinking, analyzing, and philosophizing?
We are not examining our lives because we are always trained to do something, always busy or occupied, and never really able to examine our own lives, the complete opposite of the wisdom from Socrates. If we take to soul that wisdom from Socrates and we use it to study society, we find out that it has real meaning, because society is depressed and overall unhappy.
We also find out that Socrates lived his life and “practiced what he preached.” He felt no need for employment but lived a simple life examining his own life while everyone else believed him to be an old hermit. Who knew he would become the greatest teacher of the Western world in modern society? But everyone else was too busy conforming to society about what everyone else thought. Socrates did not care what anyone else thought because it was his life and they were not paying his bills, of which none he had.
The goal of Socrates philosophy was to arrive at the truth through deduction of each premise that could be proven invalid until only the valid points remained. Deductive reasoning was the best method to propose the argument for or against a position. In order for an argument to be true, it must be sound, meaning it can be proven by means of deduction or logical systems as a means to prove it valid. In order to prove an argument valid, premises to support the argument must be present. Each premise must be tested and proven true. If any premise is proven false, then the entire argument is said to not be valid. At its most basic level, this was the philosophy of Socrates.
To live peacefully, comfortably, and for whatever food he could find, he lived well enough to know that he knew nothing, developing the Socratic method of questioning in order to establish intense debate and critical thinking, while the majority of the un-examined lives were struggling to keep up with the norms and routines of a society that cared nothing about the individual.
Think about it.
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