Российский государственный университет им. И. Канта

Т.И. ВЕРБИЦКАЯ, Е.А. СЛЮСАРЬ

GREAT MEN OF PHYLOSOPHY AND POLITICS

(ВЫДАЮЩИЕСЯ ФИЛОСОФЫ И ПОЛИТИКИ)

Практическое пособие

Калининград

Издательство Российского государственного университета им. И. Канта

2005

УДК 802.0 (075.8)

ББК 81. 2 Англ. я 73

В 31

Составители Т.И. Вербицкая, Е.А. Слюсарь

Пособие содержит материалы по развитию навыков чтения и говорения для студентов специальностей «Философия и политология». Состоит из 10 уроков и включает аутентичный материал по темам: “Socrates”, “Plato”, “Aristotle”, Machiavelli”, “Spinoza”, “Kant”, “Hegel”, “Karl Marx”, “Soloviev”, “Berdyaev”.

Предисловие

Данное пособие предназначено для студентов исторического факультета, отделения «философии и политологии». Рекомендуется для самостоятельной работы студентам исторического факультета, а также аспирантам по специальности «Философия», «Политология», «История». Пособие построено на аутентичном материале, включает оригинальные тексты по специальности и комплекс условно-речевых упражнений, направленных на формирование коммуникативных навыков профессионального иноязычного общения, а также умения читать оригинальные тексты по специальности.

Unit 1 socrates

Learn the topical vocabulary:

бытие	being	мировоззрение	world view/outlook
душа	soul	мудрость	wisdom
добро	good	ненависть	hatred
заслужить	deserve	обвинитель	prosecutor
идеальное	ideal	убеждать	pursuade/convince
истина	truth	оценка	estimation
материальное	material	первичный	primary
материя	matter, substance	уличать	establish the guilt
метафизика	metaphysics	познание	perception/cognition
познавать	cognize	предупреждать	warn/ anticipate
приговор	sentence/verdict	развращать	corrupt/deprave
разум	reason	сознание	perception/awareness
справедливость	justice	сущее/ сущность	essence

Pre-text activities:

1. What is philosophy? What is its main problem?

2. How do you understand the expression: ”Every person has his own philosophy and

every person passes his own way of philosophizing”?

3. “Not to care for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.” Do you agree with this statement?

3. Is it possible to cognize the world? Why did the person come into it? What is the soul?

1. Read and translate the text:

Socrates (470/69-399 B.C.), mentor of Plato and founder of moral philosophy, was the son of Sophroniscus (a statuary) and Paenarete (a midwife). By universal agreement, he was uncommonly ugly: flat-nosed with protruding eyes, thick lips, and a generous girth. He dined simply, bathed infrequently, always wore the same clothes, and went about barefoot – even in the dead of winter. Possessed of remarkable powers of endurance, he could go without sleep for days, outdrink everyone without ever getting drunk, and sustain prolonged, trance-like spells of intense mental concentration.

Intimately acquainted with Athenian intellectual and cultural life, he was mightily unimpressed with both. He had little interest in the philosophical ideas of his predecessors, he disputed the alleged wisdom and moral authority of the poets, expressed deep misgivings about the truths of Homeric theology, lamented the lack of virtue in public and private life, and he had a low opinion of the sophists who professed to teach it. He had an even lower opinion of the politicians, whom he denounced as panderers to public taste more interested in beautifying the city than in improving the citizenry.

Notable for his powerful intellect, he was invincible in argument and “could do what he liked with any disputant”. He is compared to a stingray who numbs people’s minds and reduces them to helplessness. He describes himself as a gadfly trying to awaken the great Athenian steed from its intellectual and moral slumber, and considered himself as an intellectual midwife who, although himself barren, delivers young men of ideas with which they are pregnant.

Socrates attached comparable importance to dreams and oracles. His friend Chaerephon had once asked the Delphic oracle whether there is anyone wiser than Socrates, and had been told that there is not. Astonished by this pronouncement, Socrates had initially tried to refute the oracle by interrogating numerous people with a reputation for wisdom – including the politicians, the poets, and the craftsmen – in hopes of finding someone wiser than himself, but he had failed. This disappointing venture had convinced him that the god was right: no one is wiser then Socrates, albeit only in the modest sense that, unlike these others, he does not know. He concluded that he had been given a divine mission to spend his life philosophizing, examining himself and others, convicting them of moral ignorance, and persuading them that they are in the same deplorable epistemic condition as he. At the age of seventy, he was accused of not believing in the gods of the city, of introducing new gods, and of corrupting the youths. Found guilty, he was sentenced to death by hemlock. Having declined the chance to escape from prison, he was executed in 399.

Since Socrates wrote nothing, our knowledge of him is based wholly on the testimony of others. Anyone who undertakes to write about him must take a stand on the so-called “Socratic problem” generated by the fact that our three major sources of first-hand information – Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato – have handed down radically different and unreconcilable portraits.

Most scholars have opted for Plato’s portrait. Aristophanes was a comic poet, and his Socrates is an obvious caricature. The Clouds is at once a parody of Socrates and a spoof of Philosophy, written for laughs rather than as a source of reliable biographical information. Xenophon, on the other hand, was a Socratic apologist. His Socrates is a serious thinker, but he also sometimes of a bore – an inexhaustible conduit of numbingly predictable and eminently forgettable platitudes. It is hard to understand how so innocuous a person could have attracted the likes of Alcibiades and Critias, or why anyone would have bothered to execute him. Plato answers these questions. His Socrates is neither an unabashed clown no a benign moralizer, but a disturbing philosopher-critic – exactly the sort of person his contemporaries might have judged subversive and worthy of death.

Socrates’s appearance on the fifth-century Athenian scene marked a radical turning point in the development of Greek philosophy – so radical, in fact, that his predecessors are generically referred to as pre-Socratics. Abandoning cosmological speculation on the ground that its physicalistic and reductionistic explanations ignore the rational determinants of human conduct, he occupied himself exclusively with practical questions: What is piety? What is temperance? What is courage? He objected to elucidating moral concepts by appeal to particular cases or commonly held opinions, and insisted on exact definitions. According to Aristotle Socrates searched for general and universal definitions of ethical terms. According to him any adequate definition of piety must state the common character possessed by all pious actions by which they are pious. The same is true of all the other virtues.

Socrates achieved high visibility (and later notoriety) because of the questions with which he afflicted his contemporaries and the arguments with which he refuted them. Socrates’s dialectical purpose is variously interpreted: according to some, he is trying to refute his interlocutor’s errors: according to others, he is simply trying to demonstrate inconsistency in his interlocutor’s belief-set. Whichever view one adopts, the final outcome is always the same: the interlocutor, confident at first, is inexorably reduced to aporia-literally, without passage or way out. According to Socrates, anyone reduced to this salutary state of mind will acknowledge his moral ignorance and take the philosophical quest for the knowledge he lacks. Unlike other philosophers who employ the dialogue form, Socrates does not refute his interlocutor’s false beliefs in hopes of replacing them with true ones, but in hopes of replacing them with a desire for true ones. His primary task is to convict his interlocutors of moral ignorance and thereby render them fit dialectical partners. The proximate end of philosophizing is not the discovery of truth, but the realization that one does not have it. The etymological definition of “philosophy” as “the love of wisdom” has become hackneyed through repetition that is easy to forget that it originally meant something important. As a lover of wisdom the philosopher is distinguished from all, who claim to be wise. Philosophy is search. According to Socrates, this is not only the best life, it is the only life. The unexamined life is not worth living. It is in living the examined life rather than enjoying the epistemic benefits which result from living it, that the highest human happiness is to be found. The activity of philosophizing is not a means to happiness understood as an end distinct from philosophizing and contingently connected to it as a causal consequence; it is happiness.

No account of Socrates would be complete without a brief discussion of his views. 1 The soul is more important than the body. By “the soul”, Socrates does not mean some metaphysical entity distinct from the body and capable of existing independently of it. The soul is “that in us, whatever it is, which is concerned with justice and injustice”. As such it is our most priceless possession and its care our most important task. 2 One ought never to requite evil with evil. Since the soul is benefited by acting justly and harmed by acting unjustly, one ought to act unjustly – not even if one has been treated unjustly oneself. 3 It is better to suffer than to commit injustice. Since acting unjustly harms the soul of the wrongdoer, thereby damaging that in him which is concerned with justice and injustice, it is psychologically and morally preferable to endure any amount of unjust treatment than to be unjust oneself. 4 No one errs voluntarily. This thesis – the so-called “Socratic paradox” – constitutes the very heart of Socratic intellectualism. Since everyone desires happiness and since the good is beneficial and the evil harmful it follows that all desire is for the good i.e. that no one desires evil recognized as evil but only because it is mistakenly judged to be good. Hence whoever knows what is good and what is evil will never act contrary to his knowledge. Simply, moral weakness is impossible: all wrongdoing is the result of ignorance. 5 The doctrine of the unity of the virtues. Socrates believed that the virtues constitute a unity - not in the sense that they are inter-entailing in such a way that one cannot having single virtue without having all the others, e.g. one cannot be courageous without being wise.