Socrates

AbstractSocrates (ca. 469–399BCE) is at once one of the most influential and one of the most mysterious and malleable figures in the history of Western ethical philosophy. Almost every ancient Greek and Roman philosophical school, from the iconoclastic Cynics and skeptical Academy to the system‐building Stoics and hedonistic Cyrenaics, claimed Socrates as an intellectual ancestor and moral exemplar (seeAncient Ethics; Cyrenaics; Hellenistic Ethics; Stoicism). His ideas about virtue, wisdom, and happiness set the agenda for subsequent ethical inquiry, and his life and example continued to exert their power down through the Western philosophical tradition, influencing and inspiring philosophers from Kierkegaard and Freud to contemporary proponents of virtue ethics (seeEudaimonism; Virtue Ethics). Yet, as this diversity of appropriations of Socrates and the Socratic life indicates, the man himself has always been something of an enigma, his life, ideas, and significance seen differently depending on who is looking at him. This held true even for those who knew him when he was alive: the decades after Socrates' death saw the emergence of a surprisingly diverse group of “Socratic” philosophers, as former companions of Socrates debated vigorously about the meaning of their mentor's life and work, often through the medium of Socratic dialogues (Döring 2011). Socrates himself, however, wrote nothing, and the three significant surviving depictions of Socrates – in the works of the comic playwright Aristophanes, the soldier and historian Xenophon, and the philosopher Plato – ascribe very different personalities and philosophical interests and commitments to their subject (on Aristophanes' Socrates, see Konstan 2011; on Xenophon's, see Dorion 2006). All agree he was a strange but compelling man, but they disagree about most of the reasons why.