Can I read Socrates : A Source Book (open University Set Book-arts Foundation Course) on EtoBox?

Socrates : A Source Book (open University Set Book-arts Foundation Course) by John Ferguson (editor) is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Socrates : A Source Book (open University Set Book-arts Foundation Course) about?

The main sources from which our knowledge of Socrates is drawn are Plato and Xenophon. Both knew him personally. Both wrote voluminously about him. Both depict him in dramatic situations. Both include a certain amount of biographical detail incidentally to their main purpose. Both record the defence Socrates is supposed to have made at his trial. Unfortunately, their evidence conflicts. It is not merely that the two defence speeches are completely different. It is that in the pages of Xenophon Socrates appears as an eminently worthy but dull, prosy and sententious moralist (‘the patron-saint of moral twaddle’, said Hegel); in the pages of Plato, he is witty and humorous, and a great metaphysical thinker as well. It is Socrates who propounds the Theory of Forms, the theory that the material world is unstable, fluctuating and unreal, and true reality exists in the stable, unchanging Forms which lie behind the material world, invisible and inaccessible to the senses, but accessible to the intellect. Thus, all the beauty in this world is imperfect. Perfect beauty is the Form of beauty, and the objects we call beautiful are beautiful in so far as they imitate or participate in the Form

Who reads Socrates : A Source Book (open University Set Book-arts Foundation Course)?

Author

John Ferguson (editor)

Publisher

Macmillan for the Open University Press

Published

1970

Language

EN

ISBN

9780333117033

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

Fiction, Philosophy