Research On The Teaching Thoughts Of Plato's Virtues

Plato developes his philosophy out of his concern for the moral reform,through education,of the society he belonged to.This dissertation examines Plato's doctrine of teaching virtue.Socrates,a searcher for definitions of specifically moral virtues,gets an insight that knowledge is essential to realization for true virtue.Admitting this insight,Plato further elucidates the meaning of knowledge requisite for virtue.Though virtue should be teachable,the question of the teachability of virtue will remain unsolved until we have explained the essential nature of virtue itself.Some clarification is made with regard to the use of the term,techne,in the context.episteme.No one does wrong willingly,as the corollary of virtue is knowledge,ties the knot of morality and knowledge even tighter.The employment for hypothesis and the theory of recollection suggests a way toward finding and explicating the knowledge that leads to the good.Plato makes it clear that phronesis into the Good and love of the Good are one.Then he provides an education program for teaching others to reach the insight into virtue.In his highly technical epistemological dialogue Plato states that the intellectual aporia will always result without moral arete j and the man who sought true knowledge must ascent to the Good properly.In effect,the intellectual aspect of virtue is expanded.In the later dialogues of the dialectic of descent from the Good to sense phenomena,Plato tries to find the method of teaching virtue.He finds that the true teacher must know the truly real in order to teach others.Finally,he considers the teachability of moral virtue in a sociopolitical context,and puts man,s pleasures and pains experience under the moral aspect of teaching,which expands the teachability of virtue in the sphere of the individual.Against the claims of the sophists to be teachers,Socrates useselenchus to show that people actually do not know what they thought they have known.Plato*s teaching theories of the Soul and his scheme of education as outlined in the Republic,makes virtue more teachable.The conclusion is that the teaching of moral education today tends to ignore the important integrative principle of unity-the morality/knowledge connection.For Plato,virtue is necessarily both moral and intellectual,and people should be moral integrity and intellectual fulfillment.Only so is virtue teachable.