What was socrates

Although some historians suggest that there may have been political machinations behind the trial, he was condemned on the basis of his thought and teaching. Socrates is unique among the great philosophers in that he is portrayed and remembered as a quasi-saint or religious figure. His passion for definitions and hair-splitting questions inspired the development of formal logic and systematic ethics from the time of Aristotle through the Renaissance and into the modern era.

But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. The Athenian philosopher Plato c. In his written dialogues he conveyed and expanded on the ideas and techniques of his teacher Socrates. The Academy he The Greek philosopher Aristotle B. Though overshadowed in classical times by the work of his teacher Plato, from late antiquity The so-called golden age of Athenian culture flourished under the leadership of Pericles B.

Pericles transformed his The warrior Achilles is one of the great heroes of Greek mythology. One of the greatest ancient historians, Thucydides c. Known for his philosophical interests, Marcus Aurelius was one of the most respected emperors in Roman history.

Socrates has a number of strong convictions about what makes for an ethical life, though he cannot articulate precisely why these convictions are true. He believes for instance that it is never just to harm anyone, whether friend or enemy, but he does not, at least in Book I of the Republic , offer a systematic account of the nature of justice that could demonstrate why this is true.

Because of his insistence on repeated inquiry, Socrates has refined his convictions such that he can both hold particular views about justice while maintaining that he does not know the complete nature of justice. Because he is charged with corrupting the youth, Socrates inquires after who it is that helps the youth Apology , 24da. In the same way that we take a horse to a horse trainer to improve it, Socrates wants to know the person to whom we take a young person to educate him and improve him.

Whether or not Socrates—or Plato for that matter—actually thinks it is possible to achieve expertise in virtue is a subject on which scholars disagree. Throughout his defense speech Apology 20a-b, 24cc, 31b, 32d, 36c, 39d Socrates repeatedly stresses that a human being must care for his soul more than anything else see also Crito 46cd, Euthyphro 13b-c, Gorgias a4ff.

Socrates found that his fellow citizens cared more for wealth, reputation, and their bodies while neglecting their souls Apology 29db.

He believed that his mission from the god was to examine his fellow citizens and persuade them that the most important good for a human being was the health of the soul. Wealth, he insisted, does not bring about human excellence or virtue, but virtue makes wealth and everything else good for human beings Apology 30b.

Socrates believes that his mission of caring for souls extends to the entirety of the city of Athens. He argues that the god gave him to the city as a gift and that his mission is to help improve the city. He thus attempts to show that he is not guilty of impiety precisely because everything he does is in response to the oracle and at the service of the god. Socrates characterizes himself as a gadfly and the city as a sluggish horse in need of stirring up Apology 30e.

Without philosophical inquiry, the democracy becomes stagnant and complacent, in danger of harming itself and others. Just as the gadfly is an irritant to the horse but rouses it to action, so Socrates supposes that his purpose is to agitate those around him so that they begin to examine themselves.

After the jury has convicted Socrates and sentenced him to death, he makes one of the most famous proclamations in the history of philosophy. We are naturally directed by pleasure and pain. We are drawn to power, wealth and reputation, the sorts of values to which Athenians were drawn as well. The purpose of the examined life is to reflect upon our everyday motivations and values and to subsequently inquire into what real worth, if any, they have.

If they have no value or indeed are even harmful, it is upon us to pursue those things that are truly valuable. One can see in reading the Apology that Socrates examines the lives of his jurors during his own trial.

By asserting the primacy of the examined life after he has been convicted and sentenced to death, Socrates, the prosecuted, becomes the prosecutor, surreptitiously accusing those who convicted him of not living a life that respects their own humanity. He tells them that by killing him they will not escape examining their lives. We find here a conception of a well-lived life that differs from one that would likely be supported by many contemporary philosophers.

Today, most philosophers would argue that we must live ethical lives though what this means is of course a matter of debate but that it is not necessary for everyone to engage in the sort of discussions Socrates had every day, nor must one do so in order to be considered a good person. A good person, we might say, lives a good life insofar as he does what is just, but he does not necessarily need to be consistently engaged in debates about the nature of justice or the purpose of the state.

No doubt Socrates would disagree, not just because the law might be unjust or the state might do too much or too little, but because, insofar as we are human beings, self-examination is always beneficial to us. In addition to the themes one finds in the Apology , the following are a number of other positions in the Platonic corpus that are typically considered Socratic. In the Protagoras bb Socrates argues for the view that all of the virtues—justice, wisdom, courage, piety, and so forth—are one.

He provides a number of arguments for this thesis. For example, while it is typical to think that one can be wise without being temperate, Socrates rejects this possibility on the grounds that wisdom and temperance both have the same opposite: folly.

Were they truly distinct, they would each have their own opposites. As it stands, the identity of their opposites indicates that one cannot possess wisdom without temperance and vice versa.

This thesis is sometimes paired with another Socratic, view, that is, that virtue is a form of knowledge Meno 87ea; cf. Euthydemus da. Things like beauty, strength, and health benefit human beings, but can also harm them if they are not accompanied by knowledge or wisdom.

If virtue is to be beneficial it must be knowledge, since all the qualities of the soul are in themselves neither beneficial not harmful, but are only beneficial when accompanied by wisdom and harmful when accompanied by folly. Socrates famously declares that no one errs or makes mistakes knowingly Protagoras c, b-b.

When a person does what is wrong, their failure to do what is right is an intellectual error, or due to their own ignorance about what is right.

If the person knew what was right, he would have done it. Hence, it is not possible for someone simultaneously to know what is right and to do what is wrong.

If someone does what is wrong, they do so because they do not know what is right, and if they claim they have known what was right at the time when they committed the wrong, they are mistaken, for had they truly known what was right, they would have done it.

Socrates therefore denies the possibility of akrasia, or weakness of the will. No one errs willingly Protagoras c4-e6.

While it might seem that Socrates is equivocating between knowingly and willingly, a look at Gorgias ae helps clarify his thesis. Tyrants and orators, Socrates tells Polus, have the least power of any member of the city because they do not do what they want. What they do is not good or beneficial even though human beings only want what is good or beneficial. Conversely, the will that is purified by knowledge is in such a state that what follows from it will necessarily be beneficial. One of the premises of the argument just mentioned is that human beings only desire the good.

When a person does something for the sake of something else, it is always the thing for the sake of which he is acting that he wants.

All bad things or intermediate things are done not for themselves but for the sake of something else that is good. When a tyrant puts someone to death, for instance, he does this because he thinks it is beneficial in some way. Hence his action is directed towards the good because this is what he truly wants Gorgias cb. A similar version of this argument is in the Meno , 77bb.

Those that desire bad things do not know that they are truly bad; otherwise, they would not desire them. They do not naturally desire what is bad but rather desire those things that they believe to be good but that are in fact bad. They desire good things even though they lack knowledge of what is actually good. Socrates infuriates Polus with the argument that it is better to suffer an injustice than commit one Gorgias a-d. Polus agrees that it is more shameful to commit an injustice, but maintains it is not worse.

The worst thing, in his view, is to suffer injustice. Socrates argues that, if something is more shameful, it surpasses in either badness or pain or both. Since committing an injustice is not more painful than suffering one, committing an injustice cannot surpass in pain or both pain and badness.

Committing an injustice surpasses suffering an injustice in badness; differently stated, committing an injustice is worse than suffering one. Therefore, given the choice between the two, we should choose to suffer rather than commit an injustice.

This argument must be understood in terms of the Socratic emphasis on the care of the soul. Crito 47da, Republic I da. If one commits injustice, Socrates goes so far as to claim that it is better to seek punishment than avoid it on the grounds that the punishment will purge or purify the soul of its corruption Gorgias de.

The Greek word for happiness is eudaimonia , which signifies not merely feeling a certain way but being a certain way. A different way of translating eudaimonia is well-being. Many scholars believe that Socrates holds two related but not equivalent principles regarding eudaimonia: first, that it is rationally required that a person make his own happiness the foundational consideration for his actions, and second, that each person does in fact pursue happiness as the foundational consideration for his actions.

There are a number of passages in the Apology that seem to indicate that the greatest good for a human being is having philosophical conversation 36b-d, 37ea, 40ec. Meno 87ca suggests that knowledge of the good guides the soul toward happiness cf. Euthydemus ea. And at Gorgias a-c Socrates suggests that the virtuous person, acting in accordance with wisdom, attains happiness cf.

Gorgias c-e: the happiest person has no badness in his soul. As such, it requires knowledge. Just as a doctor brings about a desired result for his patient—health, for instance—so the ruler should bring about some desired result in his subject Republic c-d, c.

Medicine, insofar as it has the best interest of its patient in mind, never seeks to benefit the practitioner. This is not to say that there might not be some contingent benefit that accrues to the practitioner; the doctor, for instance, might earn a fine salary. But this benefit is not intrinsic to the expertise of medicine as such.

One could easily conceive of a doctor that makes very little money. One cannot, however, conceive of a doctor that does not act on behalf of his patient. Analogously, ruling is always for the sake of the ruled citizen, and justice, contra the famous claim from Thrasymachus, is not whatever is in the interest of the ruling power Republic ca.

The suspicion that Socrates is an ironist can mean a number of things: on the one hand, it can indicate that Socrates is saying something with the intent to convey the opposite meaning. Is the interlocutor supposed to be aware of the irony, or is he ignorant of it? Is it the job of the reader to discern the irony? Could it be both? Scholars disagree on the sense in which we ought to call Socrates ironic. When Socrates asks Callicles to tell him what he means by the stronger and to go easy on him so that he might learn better, Callicles claims he is being ironic Gorgias e.

Thrasymachus accuses Socrates of being ironic insofar as he pretends he does not have an account of justice, when he is actually hiding what he truly thinks Republic a. It is not clear which kind of irony is at work with these examples. Aristotle defines irony as an attempt at self-deprecation Nicomachean Ethics 4. He argues that self-deprecation is the opposite of boastfulness, and people that engage in this sort of irony do so to avoid pompousness and make their characters more attractive.

Above all, such people disclaim things that bring reputation. On this reading, Socrates was prone to understatement. There are some thinkers for whom Socratic irony is not just restricted to what Socrates says. As famous as the Socratic themes are, the Socratic method is equally famous.

Socrates conducted his philosophical activity by means of question an answer, and we typically associate with him a method called the elenchus. A typical Socratic elenchus is a cross-examination of a particular position, proposition, or definition, in which Socrates tests what his interlocutor says and refutes it. There is, however, great debate amongst scholars regarding not only what is being refuted but also whether or not the elenchus can prove anything. There are questions, in other words, about the topic of the elenchus and its purpose or goal.

What is piety, he asks Euthyphro. Euthyphro appears to give five separate definitions of piety: piety is proceeding against whomever does injustice 5d-6e , piety is what is loved by the gods 6e-7a , piety is what is loved by all the gods 9e , the godly and the pious is the part of the just that is concerned with the care of the gods 12e , and piety is the knowledge of sacrificing and praying 13da.

For some commentators, what Socrates is searching for here is a definition. Other commentators argue that Socrates is searching for more than just the definition of piety but seeks a comprehensive account of the nature of piety. Another reading of the Socratic elenchus is that Socrates is not just concerned with the reply of the interlocutor but is concerned with the interlocutor himself. Socrates is concerned with both epistemological and moral advances for the interlocutor and himself.

It is not propositions or replies alone that are refuted, for Socrates does not conceive of them dwelling in isolation from those that hold them.

Thus conceived, the elenchus refutes the person holding a particular view, not just the view. For instance, Socrates shames Thrasymachus when he shows him that he cannot maintain his view that justice is ignorance and injustice is wisdom Republic I d. The elenchus demonstrates that Thrasymachus cannot consistently maintain all his claims about the nature of justice.

In terms of goal, there are two common interpretations of the elenchus. Both have been developed by scholars in response to what Gregory Vlastos called the problem of the Socratic elenchus.

The problem is how Socrates can claim that position W is false, when the only thing he has established is its inconsistency with other premises whose truth he has not tried to establish in the elenchus. Tradition holds that he was an exceptional artist, and his statue of the Graces, on the road to the Acropolis, is said to have been admired into the 2nd century CE.

Socrates served with distinction in the army and, at the Battle of Potidaea, saved the life of the General Alcibiades. When he was middle-aged, Socrates' friend Chaerephon asked the famous Oracle at Delphi if there was anyone wiser than Socrates, to which the Oracle answered, "None. He found, to his dismay, "that the men whose reputation for wisdom stood highest were nearly the most lacking in it, while others who were looked down on as common people were much more intelligent" Plato, Apology , The youth of Athens delighted in watching Socrates question their elders in the market and, soon, he had a following of young men who, because of his example and his teachings, would go on to abandon their early aspirations and devote themselves to philosophy from the Greek 'Philo', love, and 'Sophia', wisdom - literally 'the love of wisdom'.

Among these were Antisthenes founder of the Cynic school , Aristippus the Cyrenaic school , Xenophon whose writings would influence Zeno of Cithium, founder of the Stoic school and, most famously, Plato the main source of our information of Socrates in his Dialogues among many others.

Every major philosophical school mentioned by ancient writers following Socrates' death was founded by one of his followers. The diversity of these schools is testimony to Socrates' wide ranging influence and, more importantly, the diversity of interpretations of his teachings.

The philosophical concepts taught by Antisthenes and Aristippus could not be more different, in that the former taught that the good life was attained by self-control and self-abnegation, while the latter claimed a life of pleasure was the only path worth pursuing.

It has been said that Socrates' greatest contribution to philosophy was to move intellectual pursuits away from the focus on 'physical science' as pursued by the so-called Pre-Socratic Philosophers such as Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and others and into the abstract realm of ethics and morality.

No matter the diversity of the schools which claimed to carry on his teachings, they all emphasized some form of morality as their foundational tenet. That the 'morality' espoused by one school was often condemned by another, again bears witness to the very different interpretations of Socrates' central message. While scholars have traditionally relied upon Plato's Dialogues as a source for information on the historical Socrates, Plato's contemporaries claimed he used a character he called 'Socrates' as a mouth-piece for his own philosophical views.

Notable among these critics was, allegedly, Phaedo, a fellow student of Socrates, whose writings are now lost, and Xenophon, whose Memorablia presents a different view of Socrates than that presented by Plato. However his teachings were interpreted, it seems clear that Socrates' main focus was on how to live a good and virtuous life. The claim atrributed to him by Plato that "an unexamined life is not worth living" Apology , 38b seems historically accurate, in that it is clear he inspired his followers to think for themselves instead of following the dictates of society and the accepted superstitions concerning the gods and how one should behave.

While there are differences between Plato's and Xenophon's depictions of Socrates, both present a man who cared nothing for class distinctions or 'proper behavior' and who spoke as easily with women, servants, and slaves as with those of the higher classes.

Dr Carolyn Price discusses the legacy of Socrates, the father of moral philosophy. 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.

For both varieties of contextualism, the Platonic dialogues are like a brilliant constellation whose separate stars naturally require separate focus. Marking the maturity of the literary contextualist tradition in the early twenty-first century is a greater diversity of approaches and an attempt to be more internally critical see Hyland Beginning in the s, Vlastos , 45—80 recommended a set of mutually supportive premises that together provide a plausible framework in the analytic tradition for Socratic philosophy as a pursuit distinct from Platonic philosophy.

The first premise marks a break with a tradition of regarding Plato as a dialectician who held his assumptions tentatively and revised them constantly; rather,. The evidence Vlastos uses varies for this claim, but is of several types: stylometric data, internal cross references, external events mentioned, differences in doctrines and methods featured, and other ancient testimony particularly that of Aristotle. The result of applying the premises is a firm list contested, of course, by others of ten theses held by Socrates, all of which are incompatible with the corresponding ten theses held by Plato , 47— Many analytic ancient philosophers in the late twentieth century mined the gold Vlastos had uncovered, and many of those who were productive in the developmentalist vein in the early days went on to constructive work of their own see Bibliography.

It is a risky business to say where ancient philosophy is now, but an advantage of an entry in a dynamic reference work is that authors are allowed, nay, encouraged to update their entries to reflect recent scholarship and sea changes in their topics.

To use them in that way is to announce in advance the results of a certain interpretation of the dialogues and to canonize that interpretation under the guise of a presumably objective order of composition—when in fact no such order is objectively known. And it thereby risks prejudicing an unwary reader against the fresh, individual reading that these works demand. As in any peace agreement, it takes some time for all the combatants to accept that the conflict has ended—but that is where we are.

In short, one is now more free to answer, Who was Socrates really? In the smaller column on the right are dates of major events and persons familiar from fifth century Athenian history.

Although the dates are as precise as allowed by the facts, some are estimated and controversial Nails Assuming that his stoneworker father, Sophroniscus, kept to the conventions, he carried the infant around the hearth, thereby formally admitting him into the family, five days after he was born, named him on the tenth day, presented him to his phratry a regional hereditary association and took responsibility for socializing him into the various institutions proper to an Athenian male.

Athens was a city of numerous festivals, competitions, and celebrations, including the Panathenaea which attracted visitors to the city from throughout the Mediterranean.

Like the Olympics, the Panathenaea was celebrated with special splendor at four-year intervals. This he delivered to Socrates in the presence of witnesses, instructing Socrates to present himself before the king archon within four days for a preliminary hearing the same magistrate would later preside at the pre-trial examination and the trial.

At the end of the Theaetetus , Socrates was on his way to that preliminary hearing. As a citizen, he had the right to countersue, the right to forgo the hearing, allowing the suit to proceed uncontested, and the right to exile himself voluntarily, as the personified laws later remind him Crito 52c.

Socrates availed himself of none of these rights of citizenship. Rather, he set out to enter a plea and stopped at a gymnasium to talk to some youngsters about mathematics and knowledge.

This preliminary hearing designated the official receipt of the case and was intended to lead to greater precision in the formulation of the charge. In Athens, religion was a matter of public participation under law, regulated by a calendar of religious festivals; and the city used revenues to maintain temples and shrines.

Evidence for irreverence was of two types: Socrates did not believe in the gods of the Athenians indeed, he had said on many occasions that the gods do not lie or do other wicked things, whereas the Olympian gods of the poets and the city were quarrelsome and vindictive ; Socrates introduced new divinities indeed, he insisted that his daimonion had spoken to him since childhood. Meletus handed over his complaint, and Socrates entered his plea.

Socrates had the right to challenge the admissibility of the accusation in relation to existing law, but he did not, so the charge was published on whitened tablets in the agora and a date was set for the pre-trial examination. From this point, word spread rapidly, probably accounting for the spike of interest in Socratic conversations recorded Symposium a—b.

At the pre-trial examination, Meletus paid no court fees because it was considered a matter of public interest to prosecute irreverence. Unlike closely timed jury trials, pre-trial examinations encouraged questions to and by the litigants, to make the legal issues more precise. This procedure had become essential because of the susceptibility of juries to bribery and misrepresentation. Spectators gathered along with the jury Apology 25a for a trial that probably lasted most of the day, each side timed by the water clock.

For example, there are no indications in the Greek text at 35d and 38b that the two votes were taken; and there are no breaks at 21a or 34b for witnesses who may have been called. Though Socrates denied outright that he studied the heavens and what is below the earth, his familiarity with the investigations of natural philosophers and his own naturalistic explanations make it no surprise that the jury remained unpersuaded.

And, seeing Socrates out-argue Meletus, the jury probably did not make fine distinctions between philosophy and sophistry.

Socrates three times took up the charge that he corrupted the young, insisting that, if he corrupted them, he did so unwillingly; but if unwillingly, he should be instructed, not prosecuted Apology 25e—26a. The jury found him guilty. By his own argument, however, Socrates could not blame the jury, for it was mistaken about what was truly in the interest of the city cf. Theaetetus d—e and thus required instruction.

In a last-minute capitulation to his friends, he offered to allow them to pay a fine of six times his net worth Xenophon Oeconomicus 2. The jury rejected the proposal. It is more likely, however, that superstitious jurors were afraid that the gods would be angry if they failed to execute a man found guilty of irreverence.