Socrates

Socrates (ca. 470–399 B.C.) agreed with the Sophists that individual experience is important. He took the injunction “Know thyself,” inscribed on the portals of the temple of Apollo at Delphi, to indicate the importance of knowing the contents of one’s own mind or soul (Allen, 1991). He went so far as to say, “The life which is unexamined is not worth living”. However, he disagreed with the Sophists’ contention that no truth exists beyond per- sonal opinion. In his search for truth, Socrates used a method sometimes called inductive definition, which started with an examination of instances of such concepts as beauty, love, justice, or truth and then moved on to such questions as, what is it that all instances of beauty have in common?

In other and relative as proof that “all things are equally false.” Furthermore, because the individual can know only his or her private perceptions, there can be no objective basis for determining truth. Gorgias’s position, as well as Protagoras’s, exemplified nihilism because it stated that there can be no objective way of determining knowledge or truth. The Sophist position also exemplifies solipsism because the self can be aware of nothing except its own experiences and mental states. Thus, Gorgias reached his three celebrated conclusions: Nothing exists; if it did exist, it could not be comprehended; and if it could be comprehended, it could not be communicated to another person.