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    Plato Paper

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    Kent Emmanuel C. Soria
    This document discusses Plato's view that one must "take care" or be careful in the pursuit of excellence to ensure they are pursuing true excellence rather than superficial goals like wealth or power. It examines Plato's view that wisdom is more important for morality than external goods or virtues alone. While wisdom is necessary to make proper use of external goods and determine what is truly good, the group concludes that once one has wisdom, external goods like health can then contribute to happiness and furthering wisdom, though it may be very difficult for most to be happy without such goods.

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    Plato Paper

    Uploaded by

    Kent Emmanuel C. Soria
    244 views2 pages
    This document discusses Plato's view that one must "take care" or be careful in the pursuit of excellence to ensure they are pursuing true excellence rather than superficial goals like wealth or power. It examines Plato's view that wisdom is more important for morality than external goods or virtues alone. While wisdom is necessary to make proper use of external goods and determine what is truly good, the group concludes that once one has wisdom, external goods like health can then contribute to happiness and furthering wisdom, though it may be very difficult for most to be happy without such goods.

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    This document discusses Plato's view that one must "take care" or be careful in the pursuit of excellence to ensure they are pursuing true excellence rather than superficial goals like wealth or power. It examines Plato's view that wisdom is more important for morality than external goods or virtues alone. While wisdom is necessary to make proper use of external goods and determine what is truly good, the group concludes that once one has wisdom, external goods like health can then contribute to happiness and furthering wisdom, though it may be very difficult for most to be happy without such goods.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    244 views2 pages

    Plato Paper

    Uploaded by

    Kent Emmanuel C. Soria
    This document discusses Plato's view that one must "take care" or be careful in the pursuit of excellence to ensure they are pursuing true excellence rather than superficial goals like wealth or power. It examines Plato's view that wisdom is more important for morality than external goods or virtues alone. While wisdom is necessary to make proper use of external goods and determine what is truly good, the group concludes that once one has wisdom, external goods like health can then contribute to happiness and furthering wisdom, though it may be very difficult for most to be happy without such goods.

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    SORIA, Kent Emmanuel || TAN, Candice || TRANGIA, Mark Jerome

    PH104 - Group 9

    Premise: Plato’s advocacy of epimeleisthai challenges traditional Greek conception of excellence.


    How do you evaluate his view about the value of external goods to morality?

    Plato’s Epimeleisthai and the value of external goods to morals

    Plato’s dialogues are full of questers for excellence. Seeing their eagerness such as those

    of the disciples of the sophists, Socrates cannot help but ask the more fundamental

    question: what is excellence in the first place? Socrates does not imply in this question

    that people do not search excellence since he believes they already do so without the

    need of his urging. He is simply asking them to ‘take care’ because in their relentless

    pursuit, the ambitious may not be careful enough to discriminate what is real excellence

    from what is not. In the name of excellence, they may obsess with the pursuit of it, and

    forget altogether the question of what excellence really is in the first place. This is what

    epimeleisthai is: to ‘take care’ or ‘be careful’ in this pursuit of excellence.

    There are many answers to the question of what excellence consists of. In Plato’s time,

    cardinal virtues such courage and self-restraint are what consists ‘arete’, Meno answered

    that excellence consists of ‘acquiring gold and silver’ or ‘ruling others’. These answers

    can almost be expected back then since these questers were not after spending their

    lives doing altruistic work but rather on desiring to live well. But according to Socrates,

    caring for one’s state of soul is more important in the quest for excellence than ambition

    and wealth. Socrates thinks that knowledge and wisdom provide everything one needs to

    live well and he shows this because he thinks that all external things such as wealth, or

    even virtues such as courage, can only be considered ‘good’ in the first place if one has
    SORIA, Kent Emmanuel || TAN, Candice || TRANGIA, Mark Jerome

    PH104 - Group 9

    wisdom. One must be able to use them properly or they cannot be considered good.

    External goods has no benefit to someone who has no knowledge.

    But the question arises whether wisdom alone is sufficient for happiness even in the

    absence of external goods. Stoicism, which flourished during hard times, affirmed this

    idea greatly. One must remember that the question of what real excellence is was

    addressed by Socrates to those who agreed that ‘arete’ meant enjoying privileges such

    as good health. In Plato’s Republic, there is the example of Glaucon, the good person

    who nevertheless experienced great suffering. This launched the question on whether the

    ‘person on the rack’ can thus be happy. In Apology, Socrates demonstrates that wisdom

    secures people from ill fortune. Since they are inter-connected, possessing wisdom

    inherently implied possessing external goods too. In Republic, Socrates says the just

    person on the rack is better than the unjust rich person though he does not claim that all

    just persons are happy even without external goods. Similar readings of other works of

    Plato prove to be inconclusive in answering the question by just analyzing Plato’s writings.

    Since this question is left as a philosophical debate for future generations, we as a group

    agree with Plato that wisdom is necessary for other virtues and external goods to be

    considered as ‘good’ or ‘beneficial’ in the first place. However, we also feel that since

    wisdom is the necessary condition for external goods such as comfort to be beneficial,

    once we have wisdom, external goods such as health can then become factors that

    contributes to happiness and in furthering wisdom. We are not saying it is impossible to

    be happy ‘living on a rack’, but it may be very hard to do so for most people.

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