Status Updates From Selections from Early Greek...

All but the third (the unexamined life is not worth living) are what I find lacking (generally speaking) in most of western philosophy since Socrates/Plato/Aristotle...Boethius...Simone Weil, Pierre Hadot...

All but the third (the unexamined life is not worth living) are what I find lacking (generally speaking) in most of western philosophy since Socrates/Plato/Aristotle...Boethius

Brief but very good prologue on Socrates before providing some excerpts of his teachings.
Some of Socrates’ legacy:
‘...virtue is knowledge; the wisest man knows that he knows nothing; the unexamined life is not worth living, and man’s most important task is the tendance of the soul[/spirit/tathaghatagharba]...’

‘...Protagoras departs so decisively from the tradition in which the Parmenidean being, the Pythagorean limited, and the Anaxagorian Nous played indispensable roles, that his theory of experience denies the presuppositions of law and constancy implicit in the very nature of the Heraclitean philosophy upon which his own epistemology rests.’

From Democritus:
‘One ought to be good, or pretend to be.’ Funny!
‘Speak true, not much.’ I like this one
‘Glory and wealth without wisdom are not safe possessions.’ - but they’re the ones who always have it! :/

From Diogenes Laertius: “...Plato wished to burn all the writings of Democritus...but certain Pythagoreans prevented him, saying that the books were already widely circulated.”

What a jerk!

‘The problem for the Atomists is to account for phenomena and “save the appearances”, while yet maintaining the validity of Parmenides’ postulate of it is or being.’

‘...Thus these things are neither seen nor heard distinctly by men, nor comprehended by the mind. And thou, now that thou hast withdrawn hither, shalt learn no more than what the mortal mind has seen.’
Empedocles

‘For scant means of acquiring knowledge are scattered among the members of the body; and many are the evils that break in to blunt the edge of studious thought. And gazing on a little portion of life that is not life, swift to meet their fate, they rise and are borne away like smoke, persuaded only of that on which each one chances as he is driven this way and that, but the whole he vainly boasts he has found...

On the Milesians, Xenophones in particular here...
'Substance can undergo no changes or transformations, since it could not be different in one part than in another, and no alteration could occur.
However, the ease with which Xenophones postulates a new sun every day suggest how little capable he was of working out the implications of his own theory.'
Ouch!

'Anaximander...offers conjectures which anticipate a theory of evolution and of the survival of the fittest.'
I did not know that !