Socrates

Key ideas

Socrates practised philosophy as conversation. He would ask someone who claimed to know what courage or justice or piety was for a definition, then show through further questions that their answers contradicted each other. This method, the elenchus, usually ended not with a conclusion but with everyone, Socrates included, admitting they did not know. His own wisdom, he said, was only that he knew he did not know.

He held that virtue is a kind of knowledge, and that no one does wrong willingly; wrongdoing comes from ignorance of what is truly good. He also held that it is worse to do injustice than to suffer it, a claim he argued for in the debate about justice that frames Plato's Republic.

His question to Euthyphro, whether something is good because the gods love it or loved by the gods because it is good, is still the standard starting point for debates about moral realism.

“The life which is unexamined is not worth living.”

Socrates, Plato, Apology 38a, trans. Benjamin Jowett

Life, briefly

Socrates was the son of a stonemason and a midwife, served as a foot soldier in the Peloponnesian War, and spent his days in the marketplace of Athens talking with anyone who would talk back. He was famous for his ugliness, his endurance and his indifference to money.

In 399 BCE he was tried for impiety and corrupting the young, convicted by a jury of 501 citizens, and sentenced to death by drinking hemlock. He refused a chance to escape. Everything we know of him comes from others, chiefly Plato, the historian Xenophon and the comic playwright Aristophanes, and their portraits do not always agree.

Major works

• None. Known through Plato's dialogues, especially the Apology, Crito and Phaedo, and Xenophon's Memorabilia

Schools of thought

Platonism

Further reading

• EncyclopediaStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Socrates
• WikipediaSocrates