Socrates

Socrates lived in Athens during the fifth century BCE, a period of political conflict and intellectual change in the Greek world. The dates of his life are usually given as about 470 to 399 BCE. Unlike many later philosophers, he left no writings. Knowledge of him therefore comes from other authors, especially Plato and Xenophon, as well as the comic playwright Aristophanes. Their works serve different purposes: Plato and Xenophon place Socrates in philosophical conversations, while Aristophanes portrays a comic version of him in the play Clouds. These accounts differ in emphasis and are not transcripts. Scholars refer to the challenge of separating the historical person from these literary portrayals as the “Socratic problem.”

The Socrates portrayed in Plato’s dialogues often examined familiar claims by asking an interlocutor to explain a concept such as justice, courage or piety. He then tested the answer through further questions, looking for contradictions or assumptions the speaker had not considered. The exchange could leave both participants without a final definition; its value lay partly in exposing the limits of confident but untested belief. Later writers associate this questioning approach with the Socratic method. The dialogues present Socrates as more interested in ethical questions and how people should live than in constructing a written system, although historians cannot assume that every argument spoken by Plato’s character records the views of the historical Socrates.

In 399 BCE, an Athenian court tried Socrates on charges associated in the surviving accounts with impiety and corrupting the young. Plato’s Apology presents a literary account of his defense and records his insistence that questioning citizens was a philosophical duty. The work is a major source for how Plato remembered Socrates, but it should not be treated as a verbatim courtroom transcript. The jury convicted him and imposed the death penalty; ancient accounts describe his death after drinking hemlock. Plato’s Crito and Phaedo also portray the final period of his life, shaping later ideas of Socrates as a thinker who accepted death rather than abandon his principles.

Socrates’ historical influence is inseparable from the works of his followers. Plato made him the central speaker in many dialogues, and Aristotle later discussed aspects of Socratic inquiry. Their portrayals helped make Socrates a lasting reference point for questions about knowledge, virtue, self-examination and the responsibilities of a citizen. Because no writings by Socrates survive and his ancient biographers shaped him for different purposes, there is no single uncontested account of his doctrines. His importance lies both in the approaches attributed to him and in the continuing debate over how those approaches should be understood.