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Why did Socrates say 'Know Thyself'?
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What did Socrates say about understanding yourself?
Aug 7, 2018 · Dating back to an ancient Greek inscription, the injunction to 'know thyself' has encouraged people to engage in a search for self-understanding. Philosophy professor Mitchell Green discusses its history and relevance to the present.
Know thyself" (Greek: Γνῶθι σαυτόν, gnōthi sauton) is a philosophical maxim which was inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo in the ancient Greek precinct of Delphi. The best-known of the Delphic maxims, it has been quoted and analyzed by numerous authors throughout history, and has been applied in many ways.
The phrase "know thyself" (Greek: γνῶθι σεαυτόν) was a maxim actually inscribed near the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Although Plato has Socrates discuss it...
- The Socratic Interpretation
- The platonic Interpretation
- The Empiricist Interpretation
- The Kantian / Post-Kantian Interpretation
- The Nietzschean Interpretation
- The Existentialist Interpretation
- The Postmodern Interpretation
- Conclusion
According to Socrates, true wisdom is knowing what you do not know. So an essential part of knowing yourself must be recognizing the limits of your own wisdom and understanding—knowing what you do genuinely know and knowing what you have yet to learn. In the Phaedodialogue, Socrates argues for the immortality of the soul. So knowing oneself for Soc...
According to Plato, in his Allegory of the Cave (Republic, Book VII), most people are like prisoners living their entire lives staring at the wall of a cave, mistaking dimly lit shadows for reality. Knowing oneself, then, for Plato is recognizing your mind’s/soul’s potential to understand the essence of philosophical concepts such as justice, love,...
According to some empiricist philosophers, such as David Hume, our personal identities are merely a bundle of experiences, perceptions, and memories. To know oneself, then, for an empiricist like Hume is to understand the ways in which your past experiences have shaped and defined yourself, including your habits, your habits and reactions, your emo...
According to Immanuel Kant, our rational categories are universal and necessary and provide the structure fo constructing and understanding the world of our experience (as opposed to the way in which reality is in itself, apart from the active role our minds play in structuring our reality). The fundamental Kantian insight that the world we experie...
According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Western culture, Western religions, and Judeo-Christian morality have all served to pacify human beings into weak, herd-like beings, masking their potential as strong, creative, and subjective individuals with their own values and with authorship over their own life stories. So for Nietzsche, “know thyself” means s...
According to existentialist philosophers—whether of the Christian variety like the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard or of the atheistic variety like the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre—we have free will to decided what to dedicate our life to—to define our own essence, as Sartresays. According to the existentialist interpretation of “know t...
The heart of the postmodern mindset is the insight that there is no such thing as context-independent truth, only truth relative to something—whether culture, history, language, or otherwise. Knowing oneself for the postmodern thinker, then, is to understand the ways in which your identity is shaped by various external factors such as your culture,...
With these many competing and overlapping interpretations of the ancient Delphic maxim “Know thyself,” and many other interpretations too numerous to mention here, it is no wonder that we are sometimes strangers to ourselves, even despite our best efforts and intentions to know and to understand ourselves or to be the most authentic versions of our...
Taking these theses together, this book argues that Socratic self-knowledge means working on oneself, with others, to become the sort of person who could know himself, and thus be responsible to the world, to others, and to oneself, intellectually, morally, and practically.
This book studies Classical-era views of self-knowledge associated with the name Socrates. The real man with that name, Socrates of Alopece , citizen of Athens (469–399 BC ), as Aristophanes and Aristotle appear to show us, really did judge self-knowledge worth pursuing and discussing.
Apr 3, 2017 · The idea of this book is to closely examine all passages where Socrates talks about the Delphic precept, ‘Know Thyself’, and see what picture of self-knowl.
