Thus the Socratic method of argumentation begins with commonplace questions which lead the opponent to believe that the questioner is simple, but ends in a complete reversal. Thus his chief contributions lie not in the construction of an elaborate system but in clearing away the false common beliefs and in leading men to an awareness of their own ignorance, from which position they may begin to discover the truth.
It was his unique combination of dialectical having to do with using logic and reasoning in an argument or discussion skill and magnetic attractiveness to the youth of Athens which gave his opponents their opportunity to bring him to trial in B. Meletus, Lycon, and Anytus charged Socrates with impiety being unreligious and with corrupting the youth of the city.
Since defense speeches were made by the principals in Athenian legal practice, Socrates spoke in his own behalf and his defense speech was a sure sign that he was not going to give in. After taking up the charges and showing how they were false, he proposed that the city should honor him as it did Olympic victors.
He was convicted and sentenced to death. Plato's Crito tells of Crito's attempts to persuade Socrates to flee the prison Crito had bribed [exchanged money for favors] the jailer, as was customary , but Socrates, in a dialogue between himself and the Laws of Athens, reveals his devotion to the city and his obligation to obey its laws even if they lead to his death.
In the Phaedo, Plato recounts Socrates's discussion of the immortality of the soul; and at the end of that dialogue, one of the most moving and dramatic scenes in ancient literature, Socrates takes the hemlock poison prepared for him while his friends sit helplessly by. He died reminding Crito that he owes a rooster to Aesculapius. Socrates was the most colorful figure in the history of ancient philosophy.
His fame was widespread in his own time, and his name soon became a household word although he professed no extraordinary wisdom, constructed no philosophical system, established no school, and founded no sect following. His influence on the course of ancient philosophy, through Plato, the Cynics, and less directly, Aristotle, is immeasurable. Brickhouse, Thomas C. The Philosophy of Socrates. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Chroust, Hermann. Socrates: Man and Myth. Gulley, Norman.
New York: St. Martin's Press, Phillips, Christopher. New York: Norton, Taylor, C. Socrates: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, Toggle navigation. Early life Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, an Athenian stone mason and sculptor. His thought There was a strong religious side to Socrates's character and thought which constantly revealed itself in spite of his criticism of Greek myths. His death Meletus, Lycon, and Anytus charged Socrates with impiety being unreligious and with corrupting the youth of the city.
Athenian law required all able-bodied males serve as citizen soldiers, on call for duty from ages 18 until According to Plato, Socrates served in the armored infantry — known as the hoplite — with shield, long spear and face mask.
He participated in three military campaigns during the Peloponnesian War , at Delium, Amphipolis and Potidaea, where he saved the life of Alcibiades, a popular Athenian general. Socrates was known for his fortitude in battle and his fearlessness, a trait that stayed with him throughout his life. After his trial, he compared his refusal to retreat from his legal troubles to a soldier's refusal to retreat from battle when threatened with death.
Plato's Symposium provides the best details of Socrates' physical appearance. He was not the ideal of Athenian masculinity. Short and stocky, with a snub nose and bulging eyes, Socrates always seemed to appear to be staring. However, Plato pointed out that in the eyes of his students, Socrates possessed a different kind of attractiveness, not based on a physical ideal but on his brilliant debates and penetrating thought.
Socrates always emphasized the importance of the mind over the relative unimportance of the human body. Socrates believed that philosophy should achieve practical results for the greater well-being of society.
He attempted to establish an ethical system based on human reason rather than theological doctrine. Socrates pointed out that human choice was motivated by the desire for happiness. Ultimate wisdom comes from knowing oneself.
The more a person knows, the greater his or her ability to reason and make choices that will bring true happiness.
Socrates believed that this translated into politics with the best form of government being neither a tyranny nor a democracy. Instead, government worked best when ruled by individuals who had the greatest ability, knowledge and virtue, and possessed a complete understanding of themselves. For Socrates, Athens was a classroom and he went about asking questions of the elite and common man alike, seeking to arrive at political and ethical truths.
In fact, he claimed to be ignorant because he had no ideas, but wise because he recognized his own ignorance. He asked questions of his fellow Athenians in a dialectic method — the Socratic Method — which compelled the audience to think through a problem to a logical conclusion.
Sometimes the answer seemed so obvious, it made Socrates' opponents look foolish. For this, his Socratic Method was admired by some and vilified by others. During Socrates' life, Athens was going through a dramatic transition from hegemony in the classical world to its decline after a humiliating defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War.
Athenians entered a period of instability and doubt about their identity and place in the world. Because his life is widely considered paradigmatic not only for the philosophic life but, more generally, for how anyone ought to live, Socrates has been encumbered with the adulation and emulation normally reserved for religious figures — strange for someone who tried so hard to make others do their own thinking and for someone convicted and executed on the charge of irreverence toward the gods.
Certainly he was impressive, so impressive that many others were moved to write about him, all of whom found him strange by the conventions of fifth-century Athens: in his appearance, personality, and behavior, as well as in his views and methods. So thorny is the difficulty of distinguishing the historical Socrates from the Socrateses of the authors of the texts in which he appears and, moreover, from the Socrateses of scores of later interpreters, that the whole contested issue is generally referred to as the Socratic problem.
Each age, each intellectual turn, produces a Socrates of its own. The extant sources agree that Socrates was profoundly ugly, resembling a satyr more than a man—and resembling not at all the statues that turned up later in ancient times and now grace Internet sites and the covers of books. He had wide-set, bulging eyes that darted sideways and enabled him, like a crab, to see not only what was straight ahead, but what was beside him as well; a flat, upturned nose with flaring nostrils; and large fleshy lips like an ass.
Socrates let his hair grow long, Spartan-style even while Athens and Sparta were at war , and went about barefoot and unwashed, carrying a stick and looking arrogant. Something was peculiar about his gait as well, sometimes described as a swagger so intimidating that enemy soldiers kept their distance.
He was impervious to the effects of alcohol and cold weather, but this made him an object of suspicion to his fellow soldiers on campaign. We can safely assume an average height since no one mentions it at all , and a strong build, given the active life he appears to have led. Against the iconic tradition of a pot-belly, Socrates and his companions are described as going hungry Aristophanes, Birds — In the late fifth century B.
Although many citizens lived by their labor in a wide variety of occupations, they were expected to spend much of their leisure time, if they had any, busying themselves with the affairs of the city. Other forms of higher education were also known in Athens: mathematics, astronomy, geometry, music, ancient history, and linguistics.
One of the things that seemed strange about Socrates is that he neither labored to earn a living, nor participated voluntarily in affairs of state. Rather, he embraced poverty and, although youths of the city kept company with him and imitated him, Socrates adamantly insisted he was not a teacher Plato, Apology 33a—b and refused all his life to take money for what he did. The strangeness of this behavior is mitigated by the image then current of teachers and students: teachers were viewed as pitchers pouring their contents into the empty cups that were the students.
Because Socrates was no transmitter of information that others were passively to receive, he resists the comparison to teachers. Rather, he helped others recognize on their own what is real, true, and good Plato, Meno , Theaetetus —a new, and thus suspect, approach to education.
He was known for confusing, stinging and stunning his conversation partners into the unpleasant experience of realizing their own ignorance, a state sometimes superseded by genuine intellectual curiosity.
Socrates was unconventional in a related respect. Athenian citizen males of the upper social classes did not marry until they were at least thirty, and Athenian females were poorly educated and kept sequestered until puberty, when they were given in marriage by their fathers. It was assumed among Athenians that mature men would find youths sexually attractive, and such relationships were conventionally viewed as beneficial to both parties by family and friends alike.
What was odd about Socrates is that, although he was no exception to the rule of finding youths attractive Plato, Charmides d, Protagoras a—b; Xenophon, Symposium 4. Socrates also acknowledged a rather strange personal phenomenon, a daimonion or internal voice that prohibited his doing certain things, some trivial and some important, often unrelated to matters of right and wrong thus not to be confused with the popular notions of a superego or a conscience.
The implication that he was guided by something he regarded as divine or semi-divine was all the more reason for other Athenians to be suspicious of Socrates. Socrates was usually to be found in the marketplace and other public areas, conversing with a variety of different people—young and old, male and female, slave and free, rich and poor—that is, with virtually anyone he could persuade to join with him in his question-and-answer mode of probing serious matters.
Socrates pursued this task single-mindedly, questioning people about what matters most, e. He did this regardless of whether his respondents wanted to be questioned or resisted him. The difficulties are increased because all those who knew and wrote about Socrates lived before any standardization of modern categories of, or sensibilities about, what constitutes historical accuracy or poetic license.
All authors present their own interpretations of the personalities and lives of their characters, whether they mean to or not, whether they write fiction or biography or philosophy if the philosophy they write has characters , so other criteria must be introduced for deciding among the contending views of who Socrates really was.
One thing is certain about the historical Socrates: even among those who knew him in life, there was profound disagreement about what his actual views and methods were. Our earliest extant source—and the only one who can claim to have known Socrates in his early years—is the playwright Aristophanes. His comedy, Clouds , was produced in when the other two writers of our extant sources, Xenophon and Plato, were infants. In the play, the character Socrates heads a Think-o-Rama in which young men study the natural world, from insects to stars, and study slick argumentative techniques as well, lacking all respect for the Athenian sense of propriety.
The actor wearing the mask of Socrates makes fun of the traditional gods of Athens lines —48, , —24 , mimicked later by the young protagonist, and gives naturalistic explanations of phenomena Athenians viewed as divinely directed lines —33; cf.
Theaetetus e, c—d, e—a; Phaedo 96a—a. Worst of all, he teaches dishonest techniques for avoiding repayment of debt lines — and encourages young men to beat their parents into submission lines — Thus, what had seemed comical a quarter century earlier, Socrates hanging in a basket on-stage, talking nonsense, was ominous in memory by then.
Comedy by its very nature is a tricky source for information about anyone. A good reason to believe that the representation of Socrates is not merely comic exaggeration but systematically misleading is that Clouds amalgamates in one character, Socrates, features now well known to be unique to other particular fifth-century intellectuals Dover , xxxii-lvii.
That Socrates eschewed any earning potential in philosophy does not seem to have been significant to the great writer of comedies. Aristophanes did not stop accusing Socrates in when Clouds placed third behind another play in which Socrates was mentioned as barefoot; rather, he soon began writing a revision, which he published but never produced.
Aristophanes appears to have given up on reviving Clouds in about , but his attacks on Socrates continued. Another source for the historical Socrates is the soldier-historian, Xenophon. Xenophon was a practical man whose ability to recognize philosophical issues is almost imperceptible, so it is plausible that his Socrates appears as such a practical and helpful advisor because that is the side of Socrates Xenophon witnessed. Although Xenophon tends to moralize and does not follow the superior conventions introduced by Thucydides, still it is sometimes argued that, having had no philosophical axes to grind, Xenophon may have presented a more accurate portrait of Socrates than Plato does.
He left Athens in on an expedition to Persia and, for a variety of reasons mercenary service for Thracians and Spartans; exile , never resided in Athens again.
And now a third is in order. Philosophers have usually privileged the account of Socrates given by their fellow philosopher, Plato. Plato was about twenty-five when Socrates was tried and executed, and had probably known the old man most of his life. The extant sources agree that Socrates was often to be found where youths of the city spent their time. The dialogues have dramatic dates that fall into place as one learns more about their characters and, despite incidental anachronisms, it turns out that there is more realism in the dialogues than most have suspected.
It does not follow, however, that Plato represented the views and methods of Socrates or anyone, for that matter as he recalled them, much less as they were originally uttered.
There are a number of cautions and caveats that should be in place from the start. Even when a specific festival or other reference fixes the season or month of a dialogue, or birth of a character, one should imagine a margin of error. Although it becomes obnoxious to use circa or plus-minus everywhere, the ancients did not require or desire contemporary precision in these matters.
All the children born during a full year, for example, had the same nominal birthday, accounting for the conversation at Lysis b, odd by contemporary standards, in which two boys disagree about who is the elder. This is a way of asking a popular question, Why do history of philosophy? One might reply that our study of some of our philosophical predecessors is intrinsically valuable , philosophically enlightening and satisfying.
The truly great philosophers, and Plato was one of them, are still capable of becoming our companions in philosophical conversation, our dialectical partners. Because he addressed timeless, universal, fundamental questions with insight and intelligence, our own understanding of such questions is heightened. That explains Plato, one might say, but where is Socrates in this picture? Is he interesting merely as a predecessor to Plato?
But how? That again is the Socratic problem. Inconsistencies among the dialogues seem to demand explanation, though not all philosophers have thought so Shorey Most famously, the Parmenides attacks various theories of forms that the Republic , Symposium , and Phaedo develop and defend. In some dialogues e. There are differences on smaller matters as well.
A related problem is that some of the dialogues appear to develop positions familiar from other philosophical traditions e. Three centuries of efforts to solve the Socratic problem are summarized in the following supplementary document:. Contemporary efforts recycle bits and pieces—including the failures—of these older attempts. Until relatively recently in modern times, it was hoped that confident elimination of what could be ascribed purely to Socrates would leave standing a coherent set of doctrines attributable to Plato who appears nowhere in the dialogues as a speaker.
Many philosophers, inspired by the nineteenth century scholar Eduard Zeller, expect the greatest philosophers to promote grand, impenetrable schemes.
Nothing of the sort was possible for Socrates, so it remained for Plato to be assigned all the positive doctrines that could be extracted from the dialogues. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, there was a resurgence of interest in who Socrates was and what his own views and methods were. The result is a narrower, but no less contentious, Socratic problem.
Two strands of interpretation dominated views of Socrates in the twentieth century Griswold ; Klagge and Smith Although there has been some healthy cross-pollination and growth since the mid s, the two were so hostile to one another for so long that the bulk of the secondary literature on Socrates, including translations peculiar to each, still divides into two camps, hardly reading one another: literary contextualists and analysts.
The literary-contextual study of Socrates, like hermeneutics more generally, uses the tools of literary criticism—typically interpreting one complete dialogue at a time; its European origins are traced to Heidegger and earlier to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.
The analytic study of Socrates, like analytic philosophy more generally, is fueled by the arguments in the texts—typically addressing a single argument or set of arguments, whether in a single text or across texts; its origins are in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. Hans-Georg Gadamer — was the doyen of the hermeneutic strand, and Gregory Vlastos — of the analytic.
Thus terms, arguments, characters, and in fact all elements in the dialogues should be addressed in their literary context.
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