Who said know yourself

This knowledge of oneself can be achieved only through the Socratic method, that is to say, the dialogue between the soul and itself, or between a student and his teacher.

Socrates is as often in the role of questioner, as an attendant emotional. You must be logged in to post a comment. Contents 1 Know thyself: a moral epistemological and injunction 1. You may also like. Leave a Reply Cancel reply You must be logged in to post a comment. Your donation is guaranteed to directly contribute to Africans sharing their research output with a global readership.

Skip to main content Skip to main navigation menu Skip to site footer. Requires Subscription PDF. Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the journal. Please use the link above to donate via Paypal. AJOL is a non-profit, relying on your support. Current Issue. UConn philosopher Mitchell S.

The course is based on his book published by Routledge of the same name. He recently spoke with Ken Best of UConn Today about the philosophy and understanding of self-knowledge. This is an edited transcript of their discussion.

Scholars, philosophers, and civilizations have debated this question for a long time. Why have we not been able to find the answer? It comes and goes. It did have cachet in the Greece of BC. Whether it had similar cachet years later or had something like cultural importance in the heyday of Roman civilization is another question.

Of course some philosophers would have enjoined people to engage in a search for self-understanding; some not so much. Likewise, think about the Middle Ages. You point out that the shift Descartes brought about is a turning point in Western philosophy. Even if we had been constantly enjoined to achieve self-knowledge for the 2, years since the time Socrates spoke, just as Sigmund Freud said about civilization — that civilization is constantly being created anew and everyone being born has to work their way up to being civilized being — so, too, the project of achieving self-knowledge is a project for every single new member of our species.

No one can be given it at birth. For instance, in the book I talk about the cognitive immune system that tends to make us spin information in our own favor. At what point should that point of getting to know yourself better begin? Imagine a 9-year-old gets in a fight on the playground and a teacher asks him: Given what you said to the other kid that provoked the fight, if he had said that to you, how would you feel?

But I find in some cases that this expectation is not realistic because so many people find so much fulfillment, and rightly so, in their work. I would urge people to think about what it is that gives them satisfaction? Granted we sometimes find ourselves spitting nails as we think about the challenges our jobs present to us.

But in some ways that frequent grumbling, the kind of hair-pulling stress and so forth, these might be part of what makes life fulfilling. Is this an optimal time for this to take place? I consider one component of a liberal arts education to be that of cultivation of the self. These things can be achieved through cultivation of the self, and if you want to do that you have to have some idea of how you want it to grow and develop, which requires some inkling of what kind of person you think you are and what you think you can be.

Those are achievements that students can only attain by trying things and seeing what happens. I am not suggesting that a freshman should come to college and plan in some rigorous and lockstep way to learn about themselves, cultivate themselves, and bring themselves into fruition as some fully formed adult upon graduation.