Philippine E-Journals

An Inquiry into Platonic Thought on Temperance

Ma. Asuncion Magsino

Discipline: Philosophy

 

Abstract:

Socrates’ inquiries about virtue focused not on how to practice the virtues but on whether virtuous persons know how to define these virtues. Socrates seeks the person who can best define a virtue in question because for him, the presence of virtue is not found in its practice but rather in knowledge of it expressed in a truthful definition. Socrates believed that a virtuous person’s knowledge of that virtue is what confers on him the particular virtue.