Who is socrates as a philosopher

Rituals, ceremonies, and sacrifices that were officially sanctioned by the city and its officials marked ancient Greek religion.

The sacred was woven into the everyday experience of citizens who demonstrated their piety by correctly observing their ancestral traditions. Interpretation of the gods at their temples was the exclusive domain of priests appointed and recognized by the city.

The boundary and separation between the religious and the secular that we find in many countries today therefore did not obtain in Athens. A religious crime was consequently an offense not just against the gods, but also against the city itself. Socrates and his contemporaries lived in a polytheistic society, a society in which the gods did not create the world but were themselves created. Socrates would have been brought up with the stories of the gods recounted in Hesiod and Homer, in which the gods were not omniscient, omnibenevolent, or eternal, but rather power-hungry super-creatures that regularly intervened in the affairs of human beings.

Human beings were to fear the gods, sacrifice to them, and honor them with festivals and prayers. Socrates instead seemed to have a conception of the divine as always benevolent, truthful, authoritative, and wise.

For him, divinity always operated in accordance with the standards of rationality. This conception of divinity, however, dispenses with the traditional conception of prayer and sacrifice as motivated by hopes for material payoff.

Jurors at his trial might have thought that, without the expectation of material reward or protection from the gods, Socrates was disconnecting religion from its practical roots and its connection with the civic identity of the city.

While Socrates was critical of blind acceptance of the gods and the myths we find in Hesiod and Homer, this in itself was not unheard of in Athens at the time. Solon, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, and Euripides had all spoken against the capriciousness and excesses of the gods without incurring penalty.

Though it has become customary to think of a daimon as a spirit or quasi-divinity for example, Symposium ea , in ancient Greek religion it was not solely a specific class of divine being but rather a mode of activity, a force that drives a person when no particular divine agent can be named Burkett, Socrates claimed to have heard a sign or voice from his days as a child that accompanied him and forbid him to pursue certain courses of action Plato, Apology 31c-d, 40a-b, Euthydemus ea, Euthyphro 3b, Phaedrus b, Theages a, Theaetetus cb, Rep c; Xenophon, Apology 12, Memorabilia 1.

Xenophon adds that the sign also issued positive commands Memorablia 1. This sign was accessible only to Socrates, private and internal to his own mind.

For all the jurors knew, the deity could have been hostile to Athenian interests. However, Socrates had no officially sanctioned religious role in the city.

As such, his attempt to assimilate himself to a seer or necromancer appointed by the city to interpret divine signs actually may have undermined his innocence, rather than help to establish it. His insistence that he had direct, personal access to the divine made him appear guilty to enough jurors that he was sentenced to death.

The Socratic problem is the problem faced by historians of philosophy when attempting to reconstruct the ideas of the original Socrates as distinct from his literary representations. Because he wrote nothing, what we know of his ideas and methods comes to us mainly from his contemporaries and disciples. These works are what are known as the logoi sokratikoi , or Socratic accounts. Aside from Plato and Xenophon, most of these dialogues have not survived.

What we know of them comes to us from other sources. Diogenes Laertius 6. Aeschines of Sphettus wrote seven dialogues, all of which have been lost. Phaedo of Elis wrote two dialogues. His central use of Socrates is to show that philosophy can improve anyone regardless of his social class or natural talents. Euclides of Megara wrote six dialogues, about which we know only their titles. Diogenes Laertius reports that he held that the good is one, that insight and prudence are different names for the good, and that what is opposed to the good does not exist.

All three are Socratic themes. Lastly, Aristippus of Cyrene wrote no Socratic dialogues but is alleged to have written a work entitled To Socrates. The two Socratics on whom most of our philosophical understanding of Socrates depends are Plato and Xenophon.

The Socratic problem first became pronounced in the early 19 th century with the influential work of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Until this point, scholars had largely turned to Xenophon to identify what the historical Socrates thought. Schleiermacher argued that Xenophon was not a philosopher but rather a simple citizen-soldier, and that his Socrates was so dull and philosophically uninteresting that, reading Xenophon alone, it would be difficult to understand the reputation accorded Socrates by so many of his contemporaries and nearly all the schools of philosophy that followed him.

The better portrait of Socrates, Schleiermacher claimed, comes to us from Plato. Though many scholars have since jettisoned Xenophon as a legitimate source for representing the philosophical views of the historical Socrates, they remain divided over the reliability of the other three sources. For one thing, Aristophanes was a comic playwright, and therefore took considerable poetic license when scripting his characters. Plato himself wrote dialogues or philosophical dramas, and thus cannot be understood to be presenting his readers with exact replicas or transcriptions of conversations that Socrates actually had.

What we are left with, instead, is a composite picture assembled from various literary and philosophical components that give us what we might think of as Socratic themes or motifs.

Born in B. His Clouds B. Aristophanes was much closer in age to Socrates than Plato and Xenophon, and as such is the only one of our sources exposed to Socrates in his younger years. Socrates appears in a swing high above the stage, purportedly to better study the heavens. His patron deities, the clouds, represent his interest in meteorology and may also symbolize the lofty nature of reasoning that may take either side of an argument.

The main plot of the play centers on an indebted man called Strepsiades, whose son Phidippides ends up in the school to learn how to help his father avoid paying off his debts. By the end of the play, Phidippides has beaten his father, arguing that it is perfectly reasonable to do so on the grounds that, just as it is acceptable for a father to spank his son for his own good, so it is acceptable for a son to hit a father for his own good. In addition to the theme that Socrates corrupts the youth, we therefore also find in the Clouds the origin of the rumor that Socrates makes the stronger argument the weaker and the weaker argument the stronger.

Indeed, the play features a personification of the Stronger Argument—which represents traditional education and values—attacked by the Weaker Argument—which advocates a life of pleasure. In the Birds B. We find a number of such themes prevalent in Presocratic philosophy and the teachings of the Sophists, including those about natural science, mathematics, social science, ethics, political philosophy, and the art of words. Amongst other things, Aristophanes was troubled by the displacement of the divine through scientific explanations of the world and the undermining of traditional morality and custom by explanations of cultural life that appealed to nature instead of the gods.

Additionally, he was reticent about teaching skill in disputation, for fear that a clever speaker could just as easily argue for the truth as argue against it. Athens, for which the Aristophanic Socrates is the iconic symbol. Born in the same decade as Plato B. Though he knew Socrates he would not have had as much contact with him as Plato did. His depiction of Socrates is found principally in four works: Apology —in which Socrates gives a defense of his life before his jurors— Memorabilia —in which Xenophon himself explicates the charges against Socrates and tries to defend him— Symposium —a conversation between Socrates and his friends at a drinking party—and Oeconomicus —a Socratic discourse on estate management.

Following Schleiermacher, many argued that Xenophon himself was either a bad philosopher who did not understand Socrates, or not a philosopher at all, more concerned with practical, everyday matters like economics. However, recent scholarship has sought to challenge this interpretation, arguing that it assumes an understanding of philosophy as an exclusively speculative and critical endeavor that does not attend to the ancient conception of philosophy as a comprehensive way of life.

He emphasizes the values of self-mastery enkrateia , endurance of physical pain karteria , and self-sufficiency autarkeia. Oeconomicus One can be rich even with very little on the condition that one has limited his needs, for wealth is just the excess of what one has over what one requires.

Socrates is rich because what he has is sufficient for what he needs Memorabilia 1. We also find Xenophon attributing to Socrates a proof of the existence of God. God creates a systematically ordered universe and governs it in the way our minds govern our bodies Memorabilia 1. Indeed, Socrates speaks only sparingly at the beginning of the dialogue, and most scholars do not count as Socratic the cosmological arguments therein. Plato was born to one of the wealthiest and politically influential families in Athens in B.

Though Socrates is not present in every Platonic dialogue, he is in the majority of them, often acting as the main interlocutor who drives the conversation. In other words, anything Socrates says in the dialogues is what Plato thought at the time he wrote the dialogue.

This view, put forth by the famous Plato scholar Gregory Vlastos, has been challenged in recent years, with some scholars arguing that Plato has no mouthpiece in the dialogues see Cooper xxi-xxiii.

While we can attribute to Plato certain doctrines that are consistent throughout his corpus, there is no reason to think that Socrates, or any other speaker, always and consistently espouses these doctrines. The main interpretive obstacle for those seeking the views of Socrates from Plato is the question of the order of the dialogues.

Thrasyllus, the 1 st century C. Platonist who was the first to arrange the dialogues according to a specific paradigm, organized the dialogues into nine tetralogies, or groups of four, on the basis of the order in which he believed they should be read. Another approach, customary for most scholars by the late 20 th century, groups the dialogues into three categories on the basis of the order in which Plato composed them.

Plato begins his career, so the narrative goes, representing his teacher Socrates in typically short conversations about ethics, virtue, and the best human life. Only subsequently does Plato develop his own philosophical views—the most famous of which is the doctrine of the Forms or Ideas—that Socrates defends.

Finally, towards the end of his life, Plato composes dialogues in which Socrates typically either hardly features at all or is altogether absent. There are a number of complications with this interpretive thesis, and many of them focus on the portrayal of Socrates. Though the Parmenides is a middle dialogue, the younger Socrates speaks only at the beginning before Parmenides alone speaks for the remainder of the dialogue.

While the Philebus is a late dialogue, Socrates is the main speaker. The rest of the dialogue they claim, with its emphasis on the division of the soul and the metaphysics of the Forms, is Platonic. To discern a consistent Socrates in Plato is therefore a difficult task. Instead of speaking about chronology of composition, contemporary scholars searching for views that are likely to have been associated with the historical Socrates generally focus on a group of dialogues that are united by topical similarity.

Some of the more famous positions Socrates defends in these dialogues are covered in the content section. Aristotle was born in B. Given the likelihood that Aristotle heard about Socrates from Plato and those at his Academy, it is not surprising that most of what he says about Socrates follows the depiction of him in the Platonic dialogues. Aristotle related four concrete points about Socrates. The first is that Socrates asked questions without supplying an answer of his own, because he claimed to know nothing De Elenchis Sophisticus b Second, Aristotle claims that Socrates never asked questions about nature, but concerned himself only with ethical questions.

The term better indicates that Socrates was fond or arguing via the use of analogy. For instance, just as a doctor does not practice medicine for himself but for the best interest of his patient, so the ruler in the city takes no account of his own personal profit, but is rather interested in caring for his citizens Republic d-e. The fourth and final claim Aristotle makes about Socrates itself has two parts. First, Socrates was the first to ask the question, ti esti : what is it?

For example, if someone were to suggest to Socrates that our children should grow up to be courageous, he would ask, what is courage?

That is, what is the universal definition or nature that holds for all examples of courage? Second, as distinguished from Plato, Socrates did not separate universals from their particular instantiations. For Plato, the noetic object, the knowable thing, is the separate universal, not the particular.

Given the nature of these sources, the task of recounting what Socrates thought is not an easy one. Socrates opens his defense speech by defending himself against his older accusers Apology 18a , claiming they have poisoned the minds of his jurors since they were all young men.

Amongst these accusers was Aristophanes. In addition to the claim that Socrates makes the worse argument into the stronger, there is a rumor that Socrates idles the day away talking about things in the sky and below the earth. His reply is that he never discusses such topics Apology 18a-c. Socrates is distinguishing himself here not just from the sophists and their alleged ability to invert the strength of arguments, but from those we have now come to call the Presocratic philosophers.

The Presocratics were not just those who came before Socrates, for there are some Presocratic philosophers who were his contemporaries. The term is sometimes used to suggest that, while Socrates cared about ethics, the Presocratic philosophers did not. This is misleading, for we have evidence that a number of Presocratics explored ethical issues.

The term is best used to refer to the group of thinkers whom Socrates did not influence and whose fundamental uniting characteristic was that they sought to explain the world in terms of its own inherent principles.

The 6 th cn. Milesian Thales, for instance, believed that the fundamental principle of all things was water. Anaximander believed the principle was the indefinite apeiron , and for Anaxamines it was air. Socrates suggests that he does not engage in the same sort of cosmological inquiries that were the main focus of many Presocratics. The other group against which Socrates compares himself is the Sophists, learned men who travelled from city to city offering to teach the youth for a fee.

While he claims he thinks it an admirable thing to teach as Gorgias, Prodicus, or Hippias claim they can Apology 20a , he argues that he himself does not have knowledge of human excellence or virtue Apology 20b-c. Though Socrates inquires after the nature of virtue, he does not claim to know it, and certainly does not ask to be paid for his conversations. Socrates explains that he was not aware of any wisdom he had, and so set out to find someone who had wisdom in order to demonstrate that the oracle was mistaken.

He first went to the politicians but found them lacking wisdom. He next visited the poets and found that, though they spoke in beautiful verses, they did so through divine inspiration, not because they had wisdom of any kind. Finally, Socrates found that the craftsmen had knowledge of their own craft, but that they subsequently believed themselves to know much more than they actually did.

Socrates concluded that he was better off than his fellow citizens because, while they thought they knew something and did not, he was aware of his own ignorance. The god who speaks through the oracle, he says, is truly wise, whereas human wisdom is worth little or nothing Apology 23a. Socratic ignorance is sometimes called simple ignorance, to be distinguished from the double ignorance of the citizens with whom Socrates spoke.

In showing many influential figures in Athens that they did not know what they thought they did, Socrates came to be despised in many circles. It is worth nothing that Socrates does not claim here that he knows nothing. He claims that he is aware of his ignorance and that whatever it is that he does know is worthless. Socrates has a number of strong convictions about what makes for an ethical life, though he cannot articulate precisely why these convictions are true.

He believes for instance that it is never just to harm anyone, whether friend or enemy, but he does not, at least in Book I of the Republic , offer a systematic account of the nature of justice that could demonstrate why this is true. Because of his insistence on repeated inquiry, Socrates has refined his convictions such that he can both hold particular views about justice while maintaining that he does not know the complete nature of justice. Because he is charged with corrupting the youth, Socrates inquires after who it is that helps the youth Apology , 24da.

In the same way that we take a horse to a horse trainer to improve it, Socrates wants to know the person to whom we take a young person to educate him and improve him. Whether or not Socrates—or Plato for that matter—actually thinks it is possible to achieve expertise in virtue is a subject on which scholars disagree. Throughout his defense speech Apology 20a-b, 24cc, 31b, 32d, 36c, 39d Socrates repeatedly stresses that a human being must care for his soul more than anything else see also Crito 46cd, Euthyphro 13b-c, Gorgias a4ff.

Socrates found that his fellow citizens cared more for wealth, reputation, and their bodies while neglecting their souls Apology 29db. He believed that his mission from the god was to examine his fellow citizens and persuade them that the most important good for a human being was the health of the soul. Wealth, he insisted, does not bring about human excellence or virtue, but virtue makes wealth and everything else good for human beings Apology 30b.

Socrates believes that his mission of caring for souls extends to the entirety of the city of Athens. He argues that the god gave him to the city as a gift and that his mission is to help improve the city. He thus attempts to show that he is not guilty of impiety precisely because everything he does is in response to the oracle and at the service of the god. Socrates characterizes himself as a gadfly and the city as a sluggish horse in need of stirring up Apology 30e.

Without philosophical inquiry, the democracy becomes stagnant and complacent, in danger of harming itself and others. Just as the gadfly is an irritant to the horse but rouses it to action, so Socrates supposes that his purpose is to agitate those around him so that they begin to examine themselves.

After the jury has convicted Socrates and sentenced him to death, he makes one of the most famous proclamations in the history of philosophy. We are naturally directed by pleasure and pain. We are drawn to power, wealth and reputation, the sorts of values to which Athenians were drawn as well. The purpose of the examined life is to reflect upon our everyday motivations and values and to subsequently inquire into what real worth, if any, they have.

If they have no value or indeed are even harmful, it is upon us to pursue those things that are truly valuable. One can see in reading the Apology that Socrates examines the lives of his jurors during his own trial.

By asserting the primacy of the examined life after he has been convicted and sentenced to death, Socrates, the prosecuted, becomes the prosecutor, surreptitiously accusing those who convicted him of not living a life that respects their own humanity. He tells them that by killing him they will not escape examining their lives.

Comedy by its very nature is a tricky source for information about anyone. A good reason to believe that the representation of Socrates is not merely comic exaggeration but systematically misleading is that Clouds amalgamates in one character, Socrates, features now well known to be unique to other particular fifth-century intellectuals Dover , xxxii-lvii.

That Socrates eschewed any earning potential in philosophy does not seem to have been significant to the great writer of comedies. Aristophanes did not stop accusing Socrates in when Clouds placed third behind another play in which Socrates was mentioned as barefoot; rather, he soon began writing a revision, which he published but never produced.

Aristophanes appears to have given up on reviving Clouds in about , but his attacks on Socrates continued. Another source for the historical Socrates is the soldier-historian, Xenophon.

Xenophon was a practical man whose ability to recognize philosophical issues is almost imperceptible, so it is plausible that his Socrates appears as such a practical and helpful advisor because that is the side of Socrates Xenophon witnessed. Although Xenophon tends to moralize and does not follow the superior conventions introduced by Thucydides, still it is sometimes argued that, having had no philosophical axes to grind, Xenophon may have presented a more accurate portrait of Socrates than Plato does.

He left Athens in on an expedition to Persia and, for a variety of reasons mercenary service for Thracians and Spartans; exile , never resided in Athens again. And now a third is in order. Philosophers have usually privileged the account of Socrates given by their fellow philosopher, Plato. Plato was about twenty-five when Socrates was tried and executed, and had probably known the old man most of his life. The extant sources agree that Socrates was often to be found where youths of the city spent their time.

The dialogues have dramatic dates that fall into place as one learns more about their characters and, despite incidental anachronisms, it turns out that there is more realism in the dialogues than most have suspected.

It does not follow, however, that Plato represented the views and methods of Socrates or anyone, for that matter as he recalled them, much less as they were originally uttered. There are a number of cautions and caveats that should be in place from the start. Even when a specific festival or other reference fixes the season or month of a dialogue, or birth of a character, one should imagine a margin of error. Although it becomes obnoxious to use circa or plus-minus everywhere, the ancients did not require or desire contemporary precision in these matters.

All the children born during a full year, for example, had the same nominal birthday, accounting for the conversation at Lysis b, odd by contemporary standards, in which two boys disagree about who is the elder. This is a way of asking a popular question, Why do history of philosophy? One might reply that our study of some of our philosophical predecessors is intrinsically valuable , philosophically enlightening and satisfying.

The truly great philosophers, and Plato was one of them, are still capable of becoming our companions in philosophical conversation, our dialectical partners. Because he addressed timeless, universal, fundamental questions with insight and intelligence, our own understanding of such questions is heightened. That explains Plato, one might say, but where is Socrates in this picture? Is he interesting merely as a predecessor to Plato? But how? That again is the Socratic problem.

Inconsistencies among the dialogues seem to demand explanation, though not all philosophers have thought so Shorey Most famously, the Parmenides attacks various theories of forms that the Republic , Symposium , and Phaedo develop and defend. In some dialogues e. There are differences on smaller matters as well.

A related problem is that some of the dialogues appear to develop positions familiar from other philosophical traditions e. Three centuries of efforts to solve the Socratic problem are summarized in the following supplementary document:.

Contemporary efforts recycle bits and pieces—including the failures—of these older attempts. Until relatively recently in modern times, it was hoped that confident elimination of what could be ascribed purely to Socrates would leave standing a coherent set of doctrines attributable to Plato who appears nowhere in the dialogues as a speaker.

Many philosophers, inspired by the nineteenth century scholar Eduard Zeller, expect the greatest philosophers to promote grand, impenetrable schemes. Nothing of the sort was possible for Socrates, so it remained for Plato to be assigned all the positive doctrines that could be extracted from the dialogues.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, there was a resurgence of interest in who Socrates was and what his own views and methods were. The result is a narrower, but no less contentious, Socratic problem. Two strands of interpretation dominated views of Socrates in the twentieth century Griswold ; Klagge and Smith Although there has been some healthy cross-pollination and growth since the mid s, the two were so hostile to one another for so long that the bulk of the secondary literature on Socrates, including translations peculiar to each, still divides into two camps, hardly reading one another: literary contextualists and analysts.

The literary-contextual study of Socrates, like hermeneutics more generally, uses the tools of literary criticism—typically interpreting one complete dialogue at a time; its European origins are traced to Heidegger and earlier to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. The analytic study of Socrates, like analytic philosophy more generally, is fueled by the arguments in the texts—typically addressing a single argument or set of arguments, whether in a single text or across texts; its origins are in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition.

Hans-Georg Gadamer — was the doyen of the hermeneutic strand, and Gregory Vlastos — of the analytic. Thus terms, arguments, characters, and in fact all elements in the dialogues should be addressed in their literary context. For both varieties of contextualism, the Platonic dialogues are like a brilliant constellation whose separate stars naturally require separate focus. Marking the maturity of the literary contextualist tradition in the early twenty-first century is a greater diversity of approaches and an attempt to be more internally critical see Hyland Beginning in the s, Vlastos , 45—80 recommended a set of mutually supportive premises that together provide a plausible framework in the analytic tradition for Socratic philosophy as a pursuit distinct from Platonic philosophy.

The first premise marks a break with a tradition of regarding Plato as a dialectician who held his assumptions tentatively and revised them constantly; rather,. The evidence Vlastos uses varies for this claim, but is of several types: stylometric data, internal cross references, external events mentioned, differences in doctrines and methods featured, and other ancient testimony particularly that of Aristotle. The result of applying the premises is a firm list contested, of course, by others of ten theses held by Socrates, all of which are incompatible with the corresponding ten theses held by Plato , 47— Many analytic ancient philosophers in the late twentieth century mined the gold Vlastos had uncovered, and many of those who were productive in the developmentalist vein in the early days went on to constructive work of their own see Bibliography.

It is a risky business to say where ancient philosophy is now, but an advantage of an entry in a dynamic reference work is that authors are allowed, nay, encouraged to update their entries to reflect recent scholarship and sea changes in their topics.

To use them in that way is to announce in advance the results of a certain interpretation of the dialogues and to canonize that interpretation under the guise of a presumably objective order of composition—when in fact no such order is objectively known.

And it thereby risks prejudicing an unwary reader against the fresh, individual reading that these works demand. As in any peace agreement, it takes some time for all the combatants to accept that the conflict has ended—but that is where we are. In short, one is now more free to answer, Who was Socrates really? In the smaller column on the right are dates of major events and persons familiar from fifth century Athenian history.

Although the dates are as precise as allowed by the facts, some are estimated and controversial Nails Assuming that his stoneworker father, Sophroniscus, kept to the conventions, he carried the infant around the hearth, thereby formally admitting him into the family, five days after he was born, named him on the tenth day, presented him to his phratry a regional hereditary association and took responsibility for socializing him into the various institutions proper to an Athenian male.

Athens was a city of numerous festivals, competitions, and celebrations, including the Panathenaea which attracted visitors to the city from throughout the Mediterranean.

Like the Olympics, the Panathenaea was celebrated with special splendor at four-year intervals. This he delivered to Socrates in the presence of witnesses, instructing Socrates to present himself before the king archon within four days for a preliminary hearing the same magistrate would later preside at the pre-trial examination and the trial.

At the end of the Theaetetus , Socrates was on his way to that preliminary hearing. As a citizen, he had the right to countersue, the right to forgo the hearing, allowing the suit to proceed uncontested, and the right to exile himself voluntarily, as the personified laws later remind him Crito 52c.

Socrates availed himself of none of these rights of citizenship. Rather, he set out to enter a plea and stopped at a gymnasium to talk to some youngsters about mathematics and knowledge.

This preliminary hearing designated the official receipt of the case and was intended to lead to greater precision in the formulation of the charge. In Athens, religion was a matter of public participation under law, regulated by a calendar of religious festivals; and the city used revenues to maintain temples and shrines.

Evidence for irreverence was of two types: Socrates did not believe in the gods of the Athenians indeed, he had said on many occasions that the gods do not lie or do other wicked things, whereas the Olympian gods of the poets and the city were quarrelsome and vindictive ; Socrates introduced new divinities indeed, he insisted that his daimonion had spoken to him since childhood. Meletus handed over his complaint, and Socrates entered his plea. Socrates had the right to challenge the admissibility of the accusation in relation to existing law, but he did not, so the charge was published on whitened tablets in the agora and a date was set for the pre-trial examination.

From this point, word spread rapidly, probably accounting for the spike of interest in Socratic conversations recorded Symposium a—b. At the pre-trial examination, Meletus paid no court fees because it was considered a matter of public interest to prosecute irreverence. Unlike closely timed jury trials, pre-trial examinations encouraged questions to and by the litigants, to make the legal issues more precise.

This procedure had become essential because of the susceptibility of juries to bribery and misrepresentation. Spectators gathered along with the jury Apology 25a for a trial that probably lasted most of the day, each side timed by the water clock.

For example, there are no indications in the Greek text at 35d and 38b that the two votes were taken; and there are no breaks at 21a or 34b for witnesses who may have been called. Though Socrates denied outright that he studied the heavens and what is below the earth, his familiarity with the investigations of natural philosophers and his own naturalistic explanations make it no surprise that the jury remained unpersuaded.

And, seeing Socrates out-argue Meletus, the jury probably did not make fine distinctions between philosophy and sophistry. Socrates three times took up the charge that he corrupted the young, insisting that, if he corrupted them, he did so unwillingly; but if unwillingly, he should be instructed, not prosecuted Apology 25e—26a.

The jury found him guilty. By his own argument, however, Socrates could not blame the jury, for it was mistaken about what was truly in the interest of the city cf. Theaetetus d—e and thus required instruction. Socrates is considered by many to be the founding father of Western philosophy —as well as one of the most enigmatic figures of ancient history. He wrote nothing himself, so all knowledge of the Greek philosopher has been handed down through the writings of his contemporaries and his students, primarily his star pupil, Plato.

Socrates first distinguished himself as a hoplite, or heavily armed infantryman, in the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. He earned admiration for his ability to endure physical discomfort and for his fearlessness, particularly in saving the life of Alcibiades, a respected Athenian general. In one tale, the Oracle at Delphi supposedly stated that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens.

Socrates himself believed it took a wise man to admit his ignorance. Only through the process of continual questioning could a person arrive at understanding and discover truth. He was reportedly quite a sight, defiantly swaggering through the streets, grilling whomever he encountered about how one could lead a life of integrity.

As during battle, he completely disregarded his physical appearance. He would often go out in the day barefoot and unwashed, wearing his bedclothes, his hair long and disheveled. Socrates attracted many followers among the youth, the powerful, and the wealthy of Athens. But he had detractors as well. He engaged in a war of words with the Sophists, a group of itinerant instructors who, for a fee, taught rich, young Athenian men the rhetorical skills needed in the political arena.

Socrates excoriated the Sophists for their pay-to-play philosophy. Things soon came crashing down to earth for the philosopher. Political fortunes had changed dramatically in Athens. Socrates became suspect, not only for the actions of some of his associates but because his concepts of individualism seemed too revolutionary in the politically fraught times.

In B. Rather than fleeing or renouncing his beliefs, Socrates accepted the death sentence he was given.