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Feb 8, 2024 · Socrates was forced to drink poison in 399 B.C.E. after he was found guilty on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth in Athens. Socrates died in 399 B.C.E by forced suicide after a jury of his Athenian peers found him guilty of "impiety" and "corrupting the youth."
- Austin Harvey
The character of Socrates as exhibited in Apology, Crito, Phaedo and Symposium concurs with other sources to an extent that gives confidence in Plato's depiction of Socrates in these works as being representative of the real Socrates. Socrates died in Athens in 399 BC after a trial for impiety and the corruption of the young.
- 399 BC (aged approximately 71), Athens
- 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
Sep 2, 2009 · Learn about the life and teachings of Socrates, the "Father of Western Philosophy", who was executed by the Athenians for corrupting the youth and not honoring the gods. Explore his dialogues with Plato, his students, and his legacy in the history of ideas.
- Joshua J. Mark
- Who was Socrates?Socrates was a Greek philosopher known as the Father of Western Philosophy. His teachings are primarily known through the works of his two students...
- What is Socrates best known for?Socrates is best known for his depiction in Plato's Apology (defense) as the ideal philosopher willing to die for his convictions.
Sep 16, 2005 · Socrates. The philosopher Socrates remains, as he was in his lifetime (469–399 B.C.E.), [ 1] an enigma, an inscrutable individual who, despite having written nothing, is considered one of the handful of philosophers who forever changed how philosophy itself was to be conceived.
We have a detailed account of the death of the philosopher in the dialogue Phaedo, by Plato. In his last moments, he is shown as philosophizing, in which he claims that all philosophy is concerned with how to die. Socrates died by drinking the poison hemlock. The traditional view of why Socrates died.
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Nov 9, 2009 · Socrates was a Greek philosopher who taught by asking questions and challenging his students to think for themselves. He was condemned to death by the Athenian government for corrupting the youth and not honoring the gods. He died by drinking hemlock in 399 B.C.
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