What Is Voltaire's Perception Of Wisdom?

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers” says the French philosopher Voltaire. I have to admit that prior joining the academy I was often puzzled by this sentence. After all, aren’t the answers that people give which guide our perception of wisdom? I must say that this week helped me acknowledge and enhance the idea that appreciation about various achievements in history should be given to people who asked questions regardless of the answer that they provided. In addition, what I always find fascinating is that there is always something relevant to be learned from the ancient world, even from today’s point of view. This is especially valid in Ancient Greece which without a doubt led the way to what we today call western civilization.

The rise of different classes led to the need of new and more inclusive political system, or better to say new educational system. This demand was met by teachers, professors, philosophers or so called Sophists. Sophists were people who traveled around the Greece but also other regions namely Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia etc where they exchanged ideas and theories. This provoked a revolutionary step toward philosophical advances in the future. One of the most eminent figures of the Sophists was Protagoras. "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not” he said. But what did he exactly meant by it? It basically means that we cannot find the ultimate truth for anything. Truth is relative, what it is true for one may not be true for the other. It is all depended on how one perceives the situation and how you are able provide the most reliable argumentation. When we consider the circumstances when the sophists were exercising what they did the best, teaching, we can freely conclude that they have highly contributed to pluralism in general. Nevertheless, I believe that the activity of sophists might have come to a point when it was exaggerated by charging high fees in order to help the higher strata of the population to be more persuasive and convincing. In addition, their

Not much was left from him due to the fact that he did not write too much. Most of what we know for Socrates comes from his loyal student Plato. They both defended the same discipline of thought that the knowledge is the ultimate virtue and it can be acquired by anyone. Following his teacher who was sentenced to death for impiety, Plato was disappointed with democracy and as a result started to establish a new solid ground for ethics and politics. By doing so, he again puts into question the relativism of sophists. He believed that the truth is objective and cannot be left to subjectivity of humans to define it. Hence, I believe that to a certain degree he was influenced from the pre-Socratics and particularly from the Eleatics who were defending the idea that the notion of Being is permanent and enduring. Thus, he came up with an invisible, everlasting world of ideas that can be understood only by intellect or ultimate knowledge. Aristotle on the other side brought more comprehensive ideas about the questions posed by previous philosophers. He disproved the theory of his master Plato by introducing new approach to answer the questions. There cannot be a world of ideas other that our senses cannot recognize he said. While Plato was basing his theory on pure reasoning, Aristotle was more empiricists.