Socrates vs. Plato

A detailed Summary of Socrates vs. Plato

One of the areas of greatest disagreement between Plato and Socrates was on the issue of incontinence and how the idea manifests itself in people's lives. This was one of the first areas in which Plato made a point of disagreeing with his teacher. As a consequence he develops a very different theory of motivation as compared to Socrates. We will look at Socrates' theory as well as Plato's and then decide if Plato succesfully proves his theory correct.

Socrates believes that the argument most commonly used to support the idea of incontinence is illogical. He then begins to develop an idea of motivation as separated from the tradition weakness of the will approach. There is a certain style that Socrates uses to disprove the idea of incontinence, or at the least prove it illogical. The type of argument he uses is called a reductio ad absurdum in which the theory is put through different scenarios until it is found to be contradictory or nonsensical at which point it is thought that the theory has been disproved. The popular argument of incontinence is that one sometimes does what is worse, even though it is avoidable, because they are overcome by the pleasure of that thing. One can also use good to describe pleasure so

While Socrates denies that we can have desires that run counter to our value judgements Plato makes the argument that people may have desires that don't follow a logical decision making path. For example, consider someone who wants something to drink but cannot because of an ailment that prevents them from drinking. This person has no rational reason to want to drink, it would only cause them pain, but yet the desire still exists. Thus, Plato draws a line between rational desires which make sense to the logical part of our brain and desires that go contrary to our thought process but continue to manifest themselves nonetheless. Plato in fact takes the argument a step further and hypothesizes to different parts of the soul, the rational and the appetitive. He bases this on the priniciple of opposites which states that a single thing cannot be drawn in opposite ways at once and, therefore, there must be two different parts of the soul. He also notes that this theory of opposition only applies to things that are directly contrary, in that they make no logical sense existing within the same soul and in fact cannot be reconciled or dealt with by the brain because they exist independent of each oth

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 812
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Miscellaneous

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