A statue of Socrates in Astoria, Queens, New York.

Contents
1 His life
2 Philosophy
2.1 Socratic method
2.2 Philosophical Beliefs
3 Sources for Socrates' life and philosophy
3.1 Thucydides
3.2 Satyrical playwrights
3.3 Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle
3.3.1 The Socratic Dialogues
3.4 Other views
4 Quotes
5 See also
6 Further reading and external links

His life
According to accounts from antiquity, Socrates' father was Sophroniscus, a sculptor, and his mother Phaenarete, a midwife. He was married to Xanthippe, who bore him three sons. By the cultural standards of the time, she was considered a shrew. Socrates himself attested that he, having learned to live with Xanthippe, would be able to cope with any other human being, just as a horse trainer accustomed to wilder horses might be more competent than one not. Socrates enjoyed going to symposia, drink-talking sessions. He was a legendary drinker, remaining sober even after everyone else in the party had become senselessly drunk. He also saw military action, fighting at the Battle of Potidaea, the Battle of Delium and the Battle of Amphipolis. We know from Plato's Symposium that Socrates was decorated for bravery. In one instance he stayed with the wounded Alcibiades, and probably saved his life. During such campaigns, he also showed his extraordinary hardiness, walking without shoes and a coat in winter.

Socrates lived during the time of the transition from the height of the Athenian Empire to its decline after its defeat by Sparta and its allies in the Peloponnesian War. At a time when Athens was seeking to recover from humiliating defeat, the Athenian public court was induced by three leading public figures to try Socrates for impiety and for corrupting the youth of Athens. He was found guilty as charged, and sentenced to drink hemlock.

Philosophy
Socratic method
His most important contribution to Western thought is his dialogical method of enquiry, known as the Socratic method or method of elenchos, which he largely applied to the examination of key moral concepts and was first described by Plato in the Socratic Dialogues. For this, Socrates is customarily regarded as the father and fountainhead for ethics or moral philosophy, and of philosophy in general.

The Socratic method is a negative method of hypotheses elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those which lead to contradictions. The method of Socrates is a search for the underlying hypotheses, assumptions, or axioms, which may unconsciously shape one's opinion, and to make them the subject of scrutiny, to determine their consistency with other beliefs. The basic form is a series of questions formulated as tests of logic and fact intended to help a person or group discover their beliefs about some topic, exploring the definitions or logoi (singular logos), seeking to characterise the general characteristics shared by various particular instances. To the extent to which this method is designed to bring out definitions implicit in the interlocutors' beliefs, or to help them further their understanding, it was called the method of maieutics. Aristotle attributed to Socrates the discovery of the method of definition and induction, which he regarded as the essence of the scientific method. Oddly, however, Aristotle also claimed that this method is not suitable for ethics.

A skillful teacher can actually teach students to think for themselves using this method. This is the only classic method of teaching that is known to create genuinely autonomous thinkers. There are some crucial principles to this form of teaching:

The teacher and student must agree on the topic of instruction. The student must agree to attempt to answer questions from the teacher.

The teacher and student must be willing to accept any correctly-reasoned answer. That is, the reasoning process must be considered more important than facts.

The teacher's questions must expose errors in the students' reasoning or beliefs. That is, the teacher must reason more quickly and correctly than the student, and discover errors in the students' reasoning, and then formulate a question which the students cannot answer except by a correct reasoning process. To perform this service, the teacher must be very quick-thinking about the classic errors in reasoning.

If the teacher makes an error of logic or fact, it is acceptable for a student to correct the teacher.

Since a discussion is not a dialogue, it is not a proper medium for the Socratic method. However, it is helpful -- if second best -- if the teacher is able to lead a group of students in a discussion. This is not always possible in situations that require the teacher to evaluate students, but it is preferable pedagogically, because it encourages the students to reason rather than appeal to authority.

More loosely, one can label any process of thorough-going questioning in a dialogue as an instance of the Socratic method.

Socrates applied his method to the examination of the key moral concepts at the time, the virtues of piety, wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice. Such an examination challenged the implicit moral beliefs of the interlocutors, bringing out inadequacies and inconsistencies in their beliefs, and usually resulting in puzzlement known as aporia. In view of such inadequacies, Socrates himself professed his ignorance, but others still claimed to have knowledge. Socrates believed that his awareness of his ignorance made him wiser than those who, though ignorant, still claimed knowledge. Although this belief seems paradoxical at first glance, it in fact allowed Socrates to discover his own errors where others might assume they were correct. This claim was known by the anecdote of the Delphic oracular pronouncement that Socrates was the wisest of all men.

Socrates used this claim of wisdom as the basis of his moral exhortation. Accordingly, he claimed that the chief goodness consists in the caring of the soul concerned with moral truth and moral understanding, that "wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the state", and that "life without examination [dialogue] is not worth living". Socrates also argued that to be wronged is better than to do wrong.

Philosophical Beliefs
Socrates believed that his wisdom sprung from an awareness of his own ignorance. “He knew that he knew nothing” (Thomas 83). Along these lines, Socrates also taught that all wrong doing by man could be attributed to a lack of knowledge (“Socrates” 3). In simpler terms, if a person made an error, Socrates would have believed the error must have been due to ignorance of some sort. Most of his brilliant insights such as these came from the counterexamples he asserted while in debate with another Athenian. Sometimes, Socrates’ questioning of others would lead him to the unexpected acquisition of knowledge. Although he never focused on one specific issue, most of Socrates' debates were centered around the characteristics of the ideal man as well as what form the ideal government would take. (Solomon 44).

Socrates believed that the best way for people to live was to focus not on accumulating possessions, but to focus on self-development (Gross 2). He always invited others to try and concentrate more on friendships and a sense of true community, for Socrates felt that this was the best way for people to grow together as a populace. The idea that humans possessed certain virtues formed a common thread in Socrates' teachings. These virtues represented the most important qualities for a person to have, foremost of which were the philosophical or intellectual virtues. Socrates stressed that “virtue was the most valuable of all possessions, truth lies beneath the shadows of existence, and that it is the job of the philosopher to show the rest how little they really know.” (Solomon 44)

Socrates believed that “ideals belong in a world that only the wise man can understand” making the philosopher the only type of person suitable to govern others. Socrates was in no way subtle about his particular beliefs on government. He openly objected to the democracy that was running Athens later in his life. Athenian democracy was not exclusive; Socrates objected to any form of government that did not conform to his ideal of a perfect republic led by philosophers (Solomon 49), and Athenian government was far from that. During the later stages of Socrates' life, Athens was in continual flux due to political upheaval. Democracy was at first overthrown by a faction known as the Thirty Tyrants, led by a man named Critias, who had been a student of Socrates at one time. The Tyrants ruled for a short time before the Athenian democracy was reinstated, at which point it acted to silence the voice of Socrates.

Sources for Socrates' life and philosophy
Socrates left no writings, his life and ideas are known through the writings of his contemporaries and writers of the next generations.

Sculptures and busts of Socrates depict him as a rather ugly man. These portraits were largely based on descriptions given by his disciple Plato, rather than on direct examination of the philosopher by the sculptor or sculptors.

Thucydides
References to Socrates' military duty may be found in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.

Satyrical playwrights
He was prominently lampooned in Aristophanes's comedic play The Clouds produced when Socrates was in his mid-forties. Socrates appeared in other plays by Aristophanes such as The Birds because of his being a philodorian, and also in plays by Callias, Eupolis and Telecleides, in all of which Socrates and the Sophists were criticised for "the moral dangers inherent in contemporary thought and literature".

Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle
The main source of the historical Socrates, however, is the writings of his two disciples, Xenophon, and Plato. Another important source is various references to him in Aristotle's writings.

The Socratic Dialogues
The Socratic dialogues are a series of dialogues written by Plato and Xenophon in the form of discussions between Socrates and other figures of his time, or as discussions between Socrates' followers over his concepts. Plato's Phaedo is an example of this latter category. While Plato's Apology is essentially a speech (with Socrates as speaker), it is nonetheless generally counted as one of the Socratic dialogues.

Plato's dialogues only contain the direct words of each of the speakers, while Xenophon's dialogues are written down as a continous story, containing, along with the narration of the circumstances of the dialogue, the "quotes" of the speakers.

Plato generally does not place his own ideas in the mouth of a specific speaker: he lets ideas emerge via the Socratic method, under the guidance of Socrates. Most of the dialogues present Socrates applying this method to some extent, but nowhere as completely as in the Euthyphro. In this dialogue, Socrates and Euthyphro go through several phases of refining the answer to Socrates' question, "What is piety?"

In Plato's dialogues learning appears as a process of remembering. The soul, before its incarnation in the body, was in the realm of the ideas. There it saw things the way they should really be, rather than the pale shadows or copies we experience on earth. By a process of questioning, the soul can be brought to remember the ideas in their pure form, thus bringing wisdom.

Especially for Plato's writings referring to Socrates it is not always clear which ideas brought forward by Socrates (or his friends) actually go back to Socrates himself, or which of these are new additions or elaborations by Plato: this is known as the Socratic problem. Generally, the early works of Plato are considered to be close to the spirit of Socrates, whereas the later works — including Phaedo — are rather a reflection of Plato's elaborations.

Other views
There is a theory held by some historians that Socrates was a fictional character, invented by Plato and plagiarised by Xenophon and Aristophanes, who was used to articulate points of view which were considered too revolutionary for the author to admit to holding them himself. However, this remains a minority view.

Quotes
The following quotes are attributed to Socrates in Plato's and Xenophon's writings:

The life which is unexamined is not worth living. (Apology, 38)

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. (Phaedo, 91)

So now, Athenian men, more than on my own behalf must I defend myself, as some may think, but on your behalf, so that you may not make a mistake concerning the gift of god by condemning me. For if you kill me, you will not easily find another such person at all, even if to say in a ludicrous way, attached on the city by the god, like on a large and well-bred horse, by its size and laziness both needing arousing by some gadfly; in this way the god seems to have fastened me on the city, some such one who arousing and persuading and reproaching each one of you I do not stop the whole day settling down all over. Thus such another will not easily come to you, men, but if you believe me, you will spare me; but perhaps you might possibly be offended, like the sleeping who are awakened, striking me, believing Anytus, you might easily kill, then the rest of your lives you might continue sleeping, unless the god caring for you should send you another. (Apology?)

Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt? (Last words, according to the Phaedo — Asclepius was the god of medicine and healing, to whom such a sacrifice might be made upon the curing of a disease.)

Really, Ischomachus, I am disposed to ask: "Does teaching consist in putting questions?" Indeed, the secret of your system has just this instant dawned upon me. I seem to see the principle in which you put your questions. You lead me through the field of my own knowledge, and then by pointing out analogies to what I know, persuade me that I really know some things which hitherto, as I believed, I had no knowledge of. (Oeconomicus by Xenophon, translated: The Economist by H.G. Dakyns)

See also
Socrates, a symphonic drama by Erik Satie

Further reading and external links
Project Gutenberg e-texts on Socrates, amongst others: The Dialogues of Plato
The writings of Xenophon
The satirical plays by Aristophanes
Aristotle's writings
Voltaire's Socrates
The Second Story of Meno; a continuation of Socrates' dialogue with Meno in which the boy proves root 2 is irrational (by an anonymous author)
An Introduction to Greek Philosophy, J. V. Luce, Thames & Hudson, NY, l992.
Introduction to Philosophy, Jacques Maritain
Greek Philosophers--Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, C. C. W. Taylor, R. M. Hare, and Jonathan Barnes, Oxford University Press, NY, 1998.
Taylor, C. C. W. (2001). Socrates: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Socrates".