I guess I am a follower of Socrates
So if you read my ideas about convincing someone of something, how every argument has two sides, or if you have ever been on the business end of me bashing your ideas, you can see that why I think I would have made a good student of Socrates. I found the below excerpt from this
summary of Socrates and his thoughts :
…Socrates’ method of philosophical inquiry consisted in questioning people on the positions they asserted and working them through questions into a contradiction, thus proving to them that their original assertion was wrong. Socrates himself never takes a position; in The Apology he radically and skeptically claims to know nothing at all except that he knows nothing. Socrates and Plato refer to this method of questioning as elenchus , which means something like “cross-examination” The Socratic elenchus eventually gave rise to dialectic, the idea that truth needs to be pursued by modifying one’s position through questioning and conflict with opposing ideas. It is this idea of the truth being pursued, rather than discovered, that characterizes Socratic thought and much of our world view today. The Western notion of dialectic is somewhat Socratic in nature in that it is conceived of as an ongoing process. Although Socrates in The Apology claims to have discovered no other truth than that he knows no truth, the Socrates of Plato’s other earlier dialogues is of the opinion that truth is somehow attainable through this process of elenchus .
I, however think I know stuff. I need to change that part.
I am starting to really like the idea of using the Socratic method more often. In short (from wikipedia)
In this method, a series of questions are posed to help a person or group to determine their underlying beliefs and the extent of their knowledge. The Socratic method is a negative method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those which lead to contradictions. It was designed to force one to examine his own beliefs and the validity of such beliefs.
Is it a bad thing to have a mentor who has been dead for more than 2400 years?