John M. CooperThinkers

Plato is concerned with the eternal and unaltering Forms whose natures structure our physical world and the world of decent human relations within it.

Plato is concerned with the nature of human happiness and its dependence on the perfection of mind and character that comes through the virtues of wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage.

Plato is concerned with the nature of love and the subservience of love in its genuine form to a vision of that eternal realm.

Plato is concerned with the soul and its immortality.

Socrates is a man who knew little. All he knew, humbly, was how to reason and reflect, how to improve himself and (if they would follow him in behaving the same way) help others to improve themselves, by doing his best to make his own moral, practical opinions, and his life itself, rest on appropriately tested and examined reasons—not on social authority or the say-so of esteemed poets (or philosophers) or custom or any other kind of intellectual laziness.

Socrates is a thinker for whom the search for truth consisted in a common, joint effort, undertaken in discussion together with similarly committed other persons. If achieved, it could never be a personal‘revelation’ for which any individual could claim special credit.

Socrates is a totally new kind of Greek philosopher. He denied that he had discovered some new wisdom, indeed that he possessed any wisdom at all, and he refused to hand anything down to anyone as his personal ‘truth’, his claim to fame.