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Feb 8, 2024 · Socrates was a controversial philosopher who challenged the beliefs and values of his fellow Athenians. He was sentenced to death by poisoning in 399 B.C.E. for charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, but his legacy lives on in his dialogues and ideas.
- Austin Harvey
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787). Socrates was visited by friends in his last night at prison. His discussion with them gave rise to Plato's Crito and Phaedo. Socrates was given the chance to offer alternative punishments for himself after being found guilty.
Learn how and why Socrates, the founder of Western philosophy, was executed by drinking poison in Athens. Discover his quest for wisdom, his trial for impiety and corruption, and his last words.
- Overview
- Philosophical and literary sources
- Xenophon
Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher, one of the three greatest figures of the ancient period of Western philosophy (the others were Plato and Aristotle), who lived in Athens in the 5th century BCE. A legendary figure even in his own time, he was admired by his followers for his integrity, his self-mastery, his profound philosophical insight, and his great argumentative skill. He was the first Greek philosopher to seriously explore questions of ethics. His influence on the subsequent course of ancient philosophy was so great that the cosmologically oriented philosophers who generally preceded him are conventionally referred to as the “pre-Socratics.”
Read more below: Life and personality
What did Socrates teach?
Socrates professed not to teach anything (and indeed not to know anything important) but only to seek answers to urgent human questions (e.g., “What is virtue?” and “What is justice?”) and to help others do the same. His style of philosophizing was to engage in public conversations about some human excellence and, through skillful questioning, to show that his interlocutors did not know what they were talking about. Despite the negative results of these encounters, Socrates did hold some broad positive views, including that virtue is a form of knowledge and that “care of the soul” (the cultivation of virtue) is the most important human obligation.
How do we know what Socrates thought?
Socrates wrote nothing. All that is known about him has been inferred from accounts by members of his circle—primarily Plato and Xenophon—as well as by Plato’s student Aristotle, who acquired his knowledge of Socrates through his teacher. The most vivid portraits of Socrates exist in Plato’s dialogues, in most of which the principal speaker is “Socrates.” However, the views expressed by the character are not consistent across the dialogues, and in some dialogues the character expresses views that are clearly Plato’s own. Scholars continue to disagree about which of the dialogues convey the views of the historical Socrates and which use the character simply as a mouthpiece for Plato’s philosophy.
While Socrates was alive, he was, as noted, the object of comic ridicule, but most of the plays that make reference to him are entirely lost or exist only in fragmentary form—Clouds being the chief exception. Although Socrates is the central figure of this play, it was not Aristophanes’ purpose to give a balanced and accurate portrait of him (comedy never aspires to this) but rather to use him to represent certain intellectual trends in contemporary Athens—the study of language and nature and, as Aristophanes implies, the amoralism and atheism that accompany these pursuits. The value of the play as a reliable source of knowledge about Socrates is thrown further into doubt by the fact that, in Plato’s Apology, Socrates himself rejects it as a fabrication. This aspect of the trial will be discussed more fully below.
Soon after Socrates’ death, several members of his circle preserved and praised his memory by writing works that represent him in his most characteristic activity—conversation. His interlocutors in these (typically adversarial) exchanges included people he happened to meet, devoted followers, prominent political figures, and leading thinkers of the day. Many of these “Socratic discourses,” as Aristotle calls them in his Poetics, are no longer extant; there are only brief remnants of the conversations written by Antisthenes, Aeschines, Phaedo, and Eucleides. But those composed by Plato and Xenophon survive in their entirety. What knowledge we have of Socrates must therefore depend primarily on one or the other (or both, when their portraits coincide) of these sources. (Plato and Xenophon also wrote separate accounts, each entitled Apology of Socrates, of Socrates’ trial.) Most scholars, however, do not believe that every Socratic discourse of Xenophon and Plato was intended as a historical report of what the real Socrates said, word-for-word, on some occasion. What can reasonably be claimed about at least some of these dialogues is that they convey the gist of the questions Socrates asked, the ways in which he typically responded to the answers he received, and the general philosophical orientation that emerged from these conversations.
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An Odyssey of Grecian Literature
Among the compositions of Xenophon, the one that gives the fullest portrait of Socrates is Memorabilia. The first two chapters of Book I of this work are especially important, because they explicitly undertake a refutation of the charges made against Socrates at his trial; they are therefore a valuable supplement to Xenophon’s Apology, which is dev...
- Richard Kraut
Nov 9, 2009 · Learn about Socrates, the founding figure of Western philosophy, who was executed by drinking hemlock in 399 B.C. for corrupting the youth and not honoring the gods. Explore his biography, teachings, trial and legacy through the writings of Plato and others.
The Trial of Socrates; Decided: 399 BCE: Verdict: Guilty: Charge: Failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges; Corruption of the Youth; Citation(s) Plato; Xenophon; Diogenes Laertius: Case history; Subsequent action(s) Socrates sentenced to death: Court membership; Judge(s) sitting: 500 +/- jury members in Athens: Case opinions
Sep 27, 2021 · Socrates's death to many is as important as the death of Jesus Christ. This article examines the reasons for the Athenians' execution of the great philosopher. It will discuss why he was executed and if he was an innocent victim or was he guilty of serious crimes.
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