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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2012
Wisdom from Socrates and Plato
Western philosophy originated with the concerns of Socrates and Plato about wisdom (sophia). Socrates launched a perennial discussion of wisdom as follows:
I shall call as witness to my wisdom, such as it is, the god at Delphi.…I am only too conscious that I have no claim to wisdom, great or small. So what can he mean by asserting that I am the wisest man in the world? He cannot be telling a lie; that would not be right for him.…The truth of the matter…is pretty certainly this, that real wisdom is the property of God, and this oracle is his way of telling us that human wisdom has little or no value. It seems to me that he is not referring literally to Socrates, but has merely taken my name as an example, as if he would say to us, The wisest of you men is he who realized, like Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless.
(Apology 20e, 21b, 23a–b, trans. H. Tredennick; cf. Phaedrus 278d)Wisdom, according to Socrates and Plato, leads to happiness (Meno 88c) but requires a kind of human “purification” (Phaedo 69c), because it provides an escape from evil (Phaedo 107c–d). In the Laws, Plato portrays the Athenian as stating the following: “righteousness, temperance, and wisdom [are] our salvation, and these have their home in the living might of the gods, though some faint trace of them is also plainly to be seen dwelling here within ourselves” (10.906b, trans. A. E. Taylor).
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