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Sophocles Reasons Against Ancient Greek Philosophers

Decent Essays

This survey conducted upon 11-14 year olds (Millennials) asked them 4 simple philosophical questions; What is Death? What are their views on war? What is Democracy? What characteristics define a human? In this survey, there were 53 responses. Survey dates were November 3rd and 4th. The participants are in the 7th and 8th Grade Latin classes of Mr. Di Giulio. The rest of the paper will examine their results and compare their reasonings against Ancient Greek Philosophers.

With the first question asking, What is Death? The question is a strong one and the answers can be nihilistic or religious. Most of the students answered with a familiar answer, death is when your life ends, when the soul exits the body, or organs have stopped and the majority of cells have died. But to most Philosophers, death is considered the worst evil. Sophocles is contrary to that belief, as he believes that the worst evil is that of when one wishes to die, but cannot (Written in his play, …show more content…

43.4% (23 Votes) of the surveyors chose con, 28.3% (15 Votes) for neither, 22.6% (12 Votes) for other (Other as in both or no opinion) and 5.7% (3 Votes) for pro. With nearly half of the population choosing Con, we can take the results of the vote to be Con. The majority think that war is a large disagreement between different countries that result in a lost of thousands of lives and a large debt. A large part of that is true but they have the meaning and Philosophy wrong though. As quoted by Aristotle (The most famous man is the world,) “We make war that we may live in peace.” which means that war is an effort to make peace. What the participants got right is that war is evil and bloody,“War never takes a wicked man by chance, the good man always.” -Sophocles, Philoctetes, “The objects at stake in a war against the barbarians are nothing less than our country, our life, our habits, our freedom, and all such blessings.” -Demosthenes,

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