Socrates

About this figure

Socrates (c. 470-399 BC) was an Athenian who spent his life questioning the people around him about how they ought to live, and left nothing in writing to explain why. He wrote no books, founded no school, and charged no fees; what we know of him comes entirely from people who knew him, chiefly his student Plato and the soldier and historian Xenophon, with a hostile sketch surviving in Aristophanes' comedy The Clouds. Because those accounts do not always agree, and because Plato in particular used Socrates as a character to develop his own philosophy in later dialogues, scholars still argue about where the historical Socrates ends and Plato's Socrates begins.

What comes through consistently is a method: Socrates would ask a definition-seeking question - what is courage, what is piety, what is justice - and then test the answer by drawing out its consequences until it collapsed under its own contradictions. This technique, now called the Socratic method, was less about supplying correct answers than about exposing false confidence, including his own; he claimed his only wisdom was knowing that he knew nothing. He was also devoted to a personal divine sign, a warning voice he said had never once told him what to do, only what to avoid.

In 399 BC Athens tried him on charges of impiety and corrupting the young, and a jury of his fellow citizens convicted him and sentenced him to death. Plato's Apology, Crito, and Euthyphro dramatize the trial and its surrounding events, and give the fullest picture of how Socrates defended his way of life and then accepted his sentence rather than escape into exile, on the grounds that he had spent his life arguing that a citizen owes obedience to the laws of his city. Xenophon's Memorabilia offers a plainer, less literary record of his conversations. Because the wording throughout is the recorder's rather than a document Socrates himself set down, the substance can be trusted more confidently than any single sentence attributed to him.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.