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For Socrates (469–399 BC), intellectualism is the view that "one will do what is right or best just as soon as one truly understands what is right or best"; that virtue is a purely intellectual matter, since virtue and knowledge are cerebral relatives, which a person accrues and improves with dedication to reason.
Socrates (c. 470 – 399 BC). The first historical figure who is usually called an "intellectualist" was the Greek philosopher Socrates (c. 470 – 399 BC), who taught that intellectualism allows that "one will do what is right or [what is] best, just as soon as one truly understands what is right or best"; that virtue is a matter of the intellect, because virtue and knowledge are related ...
Socrates thinks that the idea that knowledge is perception must be identical in meaning, if not in actual words, to Protagoras' famous maxim "Man is the measure of all things." Socrates wrestles to conflate the two ideas, and stirs in for good measure a claim about Homer being the captain of a team of Heraclitan flux theorists. Socrates ...
For Socrates, the reason a person is not good is because they lack knowledge. Since knowledge is united, virtues are united as well. Another famous dictum—"no one errs willingly"—also derives from this theory. [152] In Protagoras, Socrates argues for the unity of virtues using the example of courage: if someone knows what the relevant ...
Socrates is said to have pursued this probing question-and-answer style of examination on a number of topics, usually attempting to arrive at a defensible and attractive definition of a virtue. While Socrates' recorded conversations rarely provide a definite answer to the question under examination, several maxims or paradoxes for which he has ...
Socrates' response is to develop his theory of anamnesis and to suggest that the soul is immortal, and repeatedly incarnated; knowledge is in the soul from eternity (86b), but each time the soul is incarnated its knowledge is forgotten in the trauma of birth. What one perceives to be learning, then, is the recovery of what one has forgotten.
In the dialogues Socrates presents himself as a simple man who confesses that he has little knowledge. With this ironic approach he manages to confuse the other who boasts that he is an expert in the domain they discuss. The outcome of the dialogue is that Socrates demonstrates that the other person's views are inconsistent.
Here, Socrates aims at the change of Meno's opinion, who was a firm believer in his own opinion and whose claim to knowledge Socrates had disproved. It is essentially the question that begins "post-Socratic" Western philosophy. Socrates begins all wisdom with wondering, thus one must begin with admitting one's ignorance.