Ancient Greece History Co-op - Week 16 - Socrates

Week 16: We learned about the great philosophers.

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were all ancient Greeks. S - Socrates, P - Plato, A - Aristotle (SPA) is an easy way to remember the order in which they lived. Socrates was Plato's teacher, Plato was Aristotle's teacher and Aristotle was Alexander the Greats teacher. As time went on the study of philosophy changed.

Socrates liked to ask many questions. He liked to get to the truth and would ask many questions in order to do so. He had both followers and enemies. Perhaps his enemies disliked him because he questioned them until they told the truth about things they were ashamed to admit. Eventually he built up enough enemies which falsely accused him of a crime to which the punishment was death. He was well liked and respected by many, but came to an unfortunate end.

Plato wrote everything down. He had a theory known as Plato's Cave. He believed that if men were chained to the inside of the cave and that was all they ever knew they couldn't even imagine the outside world. I watched a recent 60 Minutes segment that really seemed to prove this theory. It was about a North Korean Prisoner who Escaped from a concentration style camp at the age of 23. He was born in the camp and knew nothing of the outside world until he met a prisoner who was new to the camp. The prisoner had lived in the outside world. It's unbelievable that this is happening in our world right now, and is a subject I plan to research further.

Aristotle studied everything. He was interested in science, classification, and other cultures among other things. When Alexander the Great was conquering Persia, he was also discovering and exploring unfamiliar lands. He sent samples of plants, animals and even people back to Aristotle for further study just as Lewis and Clark sent samples of plants and animals back to Thomas Jefferson during their exploration of the west.

For our project we took dried beans and looked at them through the eyes of each of the philosophers. We wrote down what each of them would have thought about the beans

Perhaps Socrates would have asked: What is it? Why is it red? What is red? What makes it interesting? Why does it grow?

Maybe Plato would have asked: How will it grow? Why are beans different colors? How big will it get? Why is one big and one small?

Perhaps Aristotle would have asked: What kind of seed is it? What does it need to grow? Where will it grow? How many different kinds of seeds are there? What parts does it have?

Then the kids decorated the papers with beans.