You are viewing the historical archive of The Philosophy Forum.
For current discussions, visit the live forum.
Go to live forum

The Socratic Paradox

Lirrey August 17, 2020 at 13:44 1100 views 2 comments
Hi, I would very much appreciate any kind of help here :-)
The scoratic paradox that No one errs or does wrong willingly or knowingly, is possible to understand in several ways. According to Santas (1964), this phrase lacks the two different, equally significant kinds of knowledge - the knowledge that something is either good or bad, and the knowledge that doing something wrong is bad for the wrongdoer.
Can you think of other ways of interpretation for this phrase that would settle the paradox?

Comments (2)

Deleted User August 17, 2020 at 13:59 #443870
This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.
Metaphysician Undercover August 18, 2020 at 01:15 #444061
There are quite a few examples of cases where people knowingly do what they believe to be bad for themselves, such as addictions, habits, and even simple instances of over indulgence, like eating.

As Socrates and Plato pointed out, this presents a dilemma for the moralist because producing moral people cannot be a simple matter of teaching morals. So this principle, that we knowingly do what is bad, provides the substance for Plato's attack on the sophists. The sophists held as a principle, that virtue is a form of knowledge. This validated the idea that virtue could be taught, and justified those sophists charging large sums of money to teach virtue. Socrates apprehended, probably through intuition, that these principles being taught by the sophists were faulty, and attacked this form of sophistry as being a type of scam. So he tried to uncovered exactly how the principles were faulty.

Plato latched onto this principle, that we knowingly do what is bad, as direct proof that virtue cannot be a form of knowledge, thereby undermining the premise of the sophists. You'll find that St. Augustine provides a much more thorough discussion of this dilemma. It has repercussions on one's understanding of free will, and the parallel dilemma of how a man's will can be free, yet God is omniscient.