Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher often considered the founder of the Western philosophical tradition, and of ethics and moral philosophy in particular. None of Socrates’s writings have survived, and he is instead known primarily through the work of his students, including Plato. Where Nietzsche finds Plato’s flawed answer to the central question of moral philosophy—that of the opposition between faith and knowledge or, for Nietzsche, instinct and reason—to be the root of much of philosophy’s subsequent errors, he blames Socrates for posing the question in such dishonest terms.
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Socrates Character Timeline in Beyond Good and Evil
The timeline below shows where the character Socrates appears in Beyond Good and Evil. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
5. Natural History of Morals
...same opposition as instinct and reason, and that this debate can be traced back to Socrates. While Nietzsche believes that Socrates’s attempt to resolve the problem was incorrect, he finds in...
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