Coming Into Being Of Philosophical Education (Parmenides, Socrates And “Disciples”)

Abstract

The subject of the research contained in the article is to describe the process of specification of philosophical knowledge. The article presents a variety of approaches towards understanding the nature of philosophy as a subject of analysis and as a phenomena research method. It studies the range of problems related to gradually developing rational culture, from natural philosophers to Socrates, who laid the foundations of ethical rationality. The treatises of the first Greek philosophers put forward the problem of sameness as a universal characteristic of the general beginning of the world. By applying the principle of sameness between being and thinking, Parmenides gave a new direction to the development of the Greek philosophical tradition. This line was carried on by Plato and Aristotle as the theory of ideas and the critical understanding of the ontological status of this concept. By drawing on the sophists experience, Socrates elaborated his own way to analyze philosophical problems. He combined the roles of a moral teacher who believed that knowledge remains empty and useless without moral aspects; a maieutic who understood that knowledge cannot be transferred "ready"; a dialectician whose consistent reasoning combined diverse and contradictory characteristics of being; an ironist who did not deny any perspective that was alien to him, rather examined it in an unbiased manner. Thanks to Socrates, the idea of truth as a movement to understanding that has an individual value related to the knowledge of phenomena, was reinforced, while philosophy is presented as a process of continuous reflection.The appeal to the origins of European education and to the works of Attic philosophers is not just a tribute to the philosophical tradition or a mark that signals the noble origin of our own theories and views.This heritage is the source and model of rational culture that determined the development vectors for European philosophical idea. According to Whitehead (1978), the whole history of European philosophy can be considered as a lengthy commentary on Timaeus (p. 142).