Socrates, Plato, St. Augustine, Kant Term Paper

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For instance Plato believed that rulers should only rule based on truth and reason and that the way to best live life itself was also based on truth and reason. This is something I agree with very strongly. When it comes to the Iraq war, for example, I feel that America's current leaders decided to start the war based not on truthfulness and reason, but for baser motives, such as coercion and a desire to expand their geographical and financial power. I strongly disagree with the war and neither Socrates nor Plato would have felt the war was justified, based on their ideas of truth, reason, and (for Plato) virtue. Plato believed that truth and reason led to virtue, and that therefore people who lived good lives were truthful, reasonable and virtuous. Like Plato, I agree that living a good life must be based on a foundation of truthfulness, about oneself, others, and the world, and that truth and reasonableness are the best ways to be a good (virtuous) person, also.

Plato, like Socrates, valued education (as I also do) and felt that youth should be educated to value truth and reason in order to become knowledgeable and virtuous individuals. Virtue would come to people as a result of being both truthful and reasonable. Plato also felt that the material world was much less important than knowledge, so that to live a good life a person should seek knowledge, not material well-being.

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Therefore to Plato, living a good life has to do with being truthful, reasonable, and virtuous, and with valuing what you know over what you have. Thinking, knowing, being truthful and being good are Plato's ideas on what makes for the living of a good life, ideas with which I also agree and try to practice in my own life.

St. Augustine believed that everything that happens in someone's life, good or bad, is part of God's will and God's plan for the person, including mistakes that are made in living life along the way. To live a good life according to St. Augustine, then, is not never making mistakes, but instead recognizing one's past mistakes and misjudgments as all being part of God's plan for oneself, in order that a person can come to recognize God's presence in every aspect of their life and therefore live the best possible life with God's love and according to God's plan. Like St. Augustine, I also believe that everyone is imperfect and no one can live life without making some mistakes. One must be honest in recognizing one's own.....

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