Socrates

Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) was born in the Athenian deme of Alopece to Sophroniscus, a stonemason, and Phaenarete, a midwife — modest origins by Athenian aristocratic standards. He received the standard education of an Athenian citizen and served as a hoplite in the Peloponnesian War, distinguishing himself at Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis. He wrote nothing. Everything we know of him comes from contemporaries — principally his pupils Plato and Xenophon, and the comic poet Aristophanes, who satirized him in the Clouds — together with later reports going back ultimately to Aristotle.

Socrates transformed philosophy from speculation about nature to the investigation of how a human being should live. His characteristic method, the elenchus, was a rigorous cross-examination that exposed contradictions in his interlocutors' beliefs about virtue, justice, courage, and piety. He claimed to know nothing and to be merely a midwife of others' ideas, yet his questioning carried strong substantive commitments: that virtue is a kind of knowledge, that no one does wrong willingly, that the care of the soul is more important than the care of the body or possessions, and that "the unexamined life is not worth living."

In 399 BCE, in the political aftermath of the rule of the Thirty Tyrants and the restoration of the democracy, Socrates was tried on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. The proceedings are dramatized in Plato's Apology. Convicted by a narrow majority, he refused the alternative penalties of fine or exile, was sentenced to death by drinking hemlock, and (according to Plato's Crito and Phaedo) declined offers of escape on principle. His composure facing death became, for the philosophic tradition, the paradigm of the philosophical life.

The "Socratic problem" — the difficulty of reconstructing the historical Socrates from incompatible portraits in Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes — has occupied scholars since antiquity. What is uncontested is his founding role. His immediate circle generated the Cynics (through Antisthenes), the Cyrenaics (through Aristippus), and the Megarians (through Euclides). Through Plato's Academy and its successors he is the ancestor of nearly every later school: Stoics, Skeptics, and ultimately the entire tradition of Western moral philosophy that takes the soul's well-being to be the central ethical question.