Socrates

Socrates of Athens (470/469–399 bce) is perhaps the most famous philosopher of all time. Yet there is a striking contrast between his extraordinary celebrity and what we know for certain about him. We know for sure that he spent his entire life in Athens, philosophizing in public and private places. We also know that he left no written works. What we know of his life and teaching comes only for a small part through the writings of contemporaries (notably Aristophanes), and mostly through the works of his many disciples, among whom stand the most prominent philosophers of the time (Plato, Antisthenes, Aristippus, Xenophon, Aeschines of Sphettos). None of these witnesses was concerned to record what Socrates did and said according to the modern standards of accurateness. Rather, each of them depicted his own view of Socrates, competing with one another as to which portrait rendered the true spirit of Socraticism. Most of what we know of Socrates also comes from later sources, which in turn depend on the writings of his contemporaries, most of which have been lost. Therefore, as a consequence of Socrates’ exceptional impact and avoidance of writing down his own thoughts, there is neither direct nor neutral access to Socrates’ life and doctrine. Every author, every school of thought, and every time period has shaped its own Socrates, according to its own agenda. Does this mean that the quest for the historical Socrates is ill-founded and the true Socrates irremediably lost? Some scholars think it does. At the very least, it seems safe to say that the study of Socrates is not separable from what is now known as the “Socratic Question.” On Socrates’ philosophical input, what does seem clear is that he introduced a major breakthrough in the history of philosophy. According to two distinct traditions in Antiquity, Socrates indeed shifted both the object and the method of philosophical inquiry. According to Cicero (and Xenophon), Socrates was the first who brought down philosophy from the heavens and placed it in cities (Tusc. V, 10). According to Aristotle (in Metaphysics), he was the first to concern himself with definitions. Both interests are amply evidenced in our main extant source of information on Socrates, which is also the trickiest to handle: the Platonic dialogues. Another reason explaining Socrates’ celebrity over the last twenty-five centuries is the most famous episode of his life, namely his death. In 399 bce, Socrates was tried, and sentenced to drink hemlock, by an Athenian popular jury of five hundred citizens. Why he was executed by the Athenian democracy remains a hotly disputed issue. Yet, even more than the portrait of Socrates as the irrepressible gadfly and soul-examiner of Athens, it is his death, and notably Plato’s dramatization of it as the martyrdom of philosophy, that made him the legend and the mystery he still is.