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Socrates and Plato (7 threads, 95 posts)
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    Excellent Points!
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    Author: * Maximius Flavius - 11 Posts on this thread out of 1,875 Posts sitewide.
    Date: Feb 6, 2003 - 19:43

    Nikolaos, you have hit the jackpot there! Wonderful discussion we have on this!

    I have to say I have some personal doubts (yes, doubts) about Clarence Darrow's view. What I mean is that of course we all seem to be familiar with beliefs concerning the existence of the supernatural (gods or daimons and so forth) and thus, if we are agnostic, there is an element of doubt.

    Socrates seems to fit into this picture quite well, actually, as Nikolaos already put forward. He seems to be doubtful of the mythology - especially the part of it we might today, in the light of science and our culture, which has "pushed" the "divine" further away from experience, call "naive" - and the "existence" of gods, but he does seem to believe in something's existence as a cause for, for example, the voices he heard, or perhaps, the world we live in, and the "reason" we have inside (Phaedo includes a lot of this discussion, of course). He is a doubter of a peculiar, undecided kind - at least in the dialogues.

    But of course, we could maybe define agnostic as "a person who refrains from statements concerning the existence of the supernatural/divine." In that sense, we could expand "agnosticism" to a person who has never even thought about the "supernatural." Of course, small babies, for example, cannot express their opinions about something divine. In addition - and this goes to babies as well! - we do not have good definitions for the "supernatural," I am afraid. If we were more radically skeptical, we could claim that, for example, belief in causality is belief in something that over-exceeds our experience - thus it is a belief in a supernatural force.

    So we might want to add the clause "- and who has the ability of forming and expressing that kind of statements" - which brings us to the doubter, doesn't it? I'm starting to believe in Darrow's view, if we approach it from this viewpoint.


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