Socrates: Am I Really Dumb?

According to Socrates’ purpose, he sought out the wisest of people, taught the principle of virtue, and shared his divine beliefs; which had ultimately caused him to create some enemies. Through elenchus and refutation, Socrates’ proved that the wisest of people really weren’t that wise, and this examination was a highly attended event by wealthy young adults.

Everyone knows some young person who is impressively street smart but does poorly in school. What a waste, we think, that one who is so intelligent about so many things in life seems unable to apply that intelligence to academic work. This is how Gerald Graff’s essay titled “Hidden Intellectualism" begins. Although this is not Graff's personal belief, he is approaching us with a common stereotype. After reading Graff's article I would say that I agree with him from beginning to end. Gerald Graff begins with differentiating between “book smarts” and “street smarts". Book smart is defined as a person who is intelligent and very well educated academically. People that are book smart can write and discuss subjects taught in school. On the

On Chaucer’s Placement and Description of the Manciple and the Reeve in the General Prologue

Homer was forced to change the way he handled every situation and his attitude towards everything because of the live event of war. He became the leader of the group when people looked to him for guidance as they relied on him. We see the kind of character Homer was before the war when Ellie is describing all the characters going to Hell. She used spoken thought when she says “Homer was Wild, Outrageous, He didn’t care what he did or what anyone thought”. This gives the reader an insight into how homer was barbaric and confident. Homer developed as a character because his friends relied on him. They needed him to make plans and decisions on how to save lee, one of their friends, and avoid the soldiers. Ellie notices these changes uses the technique of spoken thought when she says “Homer was fast becoming the teachers he despised”. This tells the reader that Homer was becoming organised, he was becoming the advisor, someone that helped everybody which is a big change from his old reckless ways. This is like teenagers in society as they become more mature through the life events they experience.Most teenagers need to change and become more mature as they need to grow up because they need to get a job, meet someone and move on in life. This is learnt from the experiences they have and the events that occur. As we grow older we mature at depending on the circumstances. Just like Homer,

In David McRaney’s book, You are Not so Smart, he accentuates that the actions we take are not based on what we believe is real. We revolve around misconception, and the truth is unknown to us. You are Not so Smart, is written in a way that intrigues to keep reading. With the chapters beginning with the misconceptions and truths of our everyday life, it gives you the ability to understand what the chapter will be about. The way David McRaney wrote this book doesn’t make you feel incapable of being smart, he wants us to understand we aren’t the only ones who believe the misconception.

Homer is changed by the war, we first understood him to be this immature and irresponsible prankster with no regard to the consequences of his actions. Homer likes stirring trouble and doesn’t care about what others say or think of him, homers attitude changes, he swiftly realizers that he can no longer mess around and cause trouble like he did before the war. Homer must take some responsibility and be accountable for his actions. “Homer was becoming more surprising with every passing hour. It was getting hard to remember that this fast thinking guy, who’d just spent fifteen minutes getting us laughing and talking and feeling good again, wasn’t even trusted to hand out the books at school.” Through unlikely circumstances Homer has had to become a mature and responsible leader for the group.

Socrates put one’s quest for wisdom and the instruction of others above everything else in life. A simple man both in the way he talked and the wealth he owned, he believed that simplicity in whatever one did was the best way of acquiring knowledge and passing it unto others. He is famous for saying that “the unexplained life is not worth living.” He endeavored therefore to break down the arguments of those who talked with a flowery language and boasted of being experts in given subjects (Rhees 30). His aim was to show that the person making a claim on wisdom and knowledge was in fact a confused one whose clarity about a given subject was far from what they claimed. Socrates, in all his simplicity never advanced any theories of his own

In his explanation of his behavior, Socrates also adds that part of his duty as a wise man, is to make sure that he questions the behavior of other wise men to make sure that those men are also aware

This made Socrates very unpopular. “As a result of this investigation, gentleman of the jury, I acquired much unpopularity, of a kind that is hard to deal with and is a heavy burden; many slanders came from these people and a reputation for wisdom, for in each case the bystanders thought that I myself possessed the wisdom that I proved that my interlocutor did not have” (Cohen, et al., 2000).

In his defense, Socrates claims over and again that he is innocent and is not at all wise, “…for I know that I have no wisdom, small or great.” Throughout the rest of his oration he seems to act the opposite as if he is better than every man, and later he even claims that, “At any rate, the world has decided that Socrates is in some way superior to other

     Socrates’ argument was unique in that he tried to convince the jury he was just an average man and not to be feared, but in actuality demonstrated how clever and tenacious he was. He begins with an anecdote of his visit to the Oracle of Delphi, which told him that there was no man smarter than he. He, being as humble as he is, could not take the Oracle’s answer for granted and went about questioning Athenians he felt surpassed his intelligence. However, in questioning

I chose the planet Venus. Venus was named after the Roman Goddess of love and is one of the only planets named after a woman. I find it ironic that the only planet named after a woman is also one of the harshest and most uninhabitable planets in the solar system. There are two theories for planet formation and the one that fits the formation of Venus is called core accretion model. The theory of core accretion says that gravity collapsed the material (dust and gas) in the solar nebula, in on itself as it spun and that formed the sun at the center.

In order to do this, he goes about Athens questioning those he believes to be wiser than him, including politicians, poets, and craftsmen. Upon this questioning, he discovers that even those perceived as the wisest actually know far less than one would expect. Even the craftsmen, who have much practical wisdom in their respective fields, see their success as merely a tribute to their vast knowledge of many subjects. This, Socrates claims, is not true wisdom. Human wisdom can be described as the acknowledgement and acceptance that one does not know everything, nor is one capable of knowing everything. This, however, does not mean that people should sit idly by, never pursuing wisdom, for it is still vital to the attainment of a good life, which should be the ultimate goal of mankind.

In the world of literature and poetry, it’s typically not hard to find something written about a hero, or something heroic, like an epic. Epics are long poems, typically told orally in ancient times, about the adventures of a hero or heroine and their deeds. The Iliad should immediately come to the mind of any student proficient in western literature. Nonetheless, the themes and archetypes of these works known as epics are so well-known, that they are even parodied, take completely out of context, and pasted on the wall for laughs. One of the most recognized parodies of this kind would be Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock.

Linguistic relativity is the notion that language can affect our thought processes, and is often referred to as the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’, after the two linguists who brought the idea into the spotlight. Whorf writes how “Language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity” (1956:212), and I will explain how it is able to do so. In this essay I will argue that certain ways of mental categorization, spatial cognition and reality interpretation, based on the characteristics of our specific variety of language, influence our perception of the world. I will discuss how languages divide up nature differently, and