The Platonist

Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times

Socrates and the Socratic Method

Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) wrote nothing. Almost everything we know about him comes from people who knew him — principally Plato and Xenophon — and from later sources like Aristotle who worked from those accounts. He spent his days in the public spaces of Athens questioning anyone who claimed to know something, became famous and infamous for it, and was eventually tried and executed by his city for impiety and corrupting the youth.

His way of arguing — the Socratic method — remains the prototype for philosophical inquiry, classroom dialectic, and modern-day cross-examination. His trial, recorded by Plato in the Apology, made him the founding martyr of Western intellectual life.

"The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being." — Socrates, Apology 38a

The Historical Socrates

Socrates was born in Athens around 470 BCE, in the generation that lived through the Persian Wars and the rise of Athenian democracy. He fought as a hoplite in three campaigns of the Peloponnesian War and was, by all accounts, exceptionally brave. He was famously plain in appearance — snub-nosed, bulging-eyed, often barefoot. He married Xanthippe and had three sons.

None of this is what made him remembered. What made him remembered is that, sometime in middle age, he became convinced that the most important thing a human being can do is examine how to live, and he devoted the rest of his life to that task in public, free of charge, with anyone who would talk to him.

The Socratic Problem

Because Socrates wrote nothing, every account we have is mediated. Plato's Socrates is a powerful philosophical figure who develops elaborate metaphysical theories. Xenophon's Socrates is a more practical, conventional moralist. Aristophanes' Socrates, in the comedy Clouds, is a sophist who teaches young men to win arguments dishonestly. Aristotle — who was born after Socrates' death and knew him only through texts — gives us his most concise summary: Socrates was the first to seek universal definitions in ethics, but did not separate them from particulars (that was Plato's move).

Reconstructing the historical Socrates is therefore a contested scholarly project, sometimes called the "Socratic problem." A common compromise is to treat the early Plato dialogues — works like the Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, Laches, and Charmides — as the closest we get to the philosophy of Socrates himself, while later dialogues use Socrates as a mouthpiece for Plato's own developing views. See our overview of Plato's dialogues for the chronology.

The Socratic Method (Elenchus)

The Socratic method, or elenchus, is a specific procedure for examining beliefs. Read carefully, the early dialogues show it has a recognisable structure:

  1. Someone claims to know what X is. Courage, piety, justice, friendship — some morally significant concept.
  2. Socrates asks them to define it. Not to give an example, but to say what it is — the feature common to all instances.
  3. Socrates extracts further commitments. He gets the interlocutor to agree to other plausible-sounding claims about the topic.
  4. The definition contradicts the commitments. Either the original definition is too narrow, or it lets in things the interlocutor wants to exclude, or it conflicts with something else they have just agreed to.
  5. The conversation ends in aporia — perplexity. The interlocutor realises they did not, after all, know what they thought they knew.

The method is destructive on the surface: it does not produce positive answers, just refutations. But Socrates clearly thinks the experience of being refuted is itself valuable. The point is not winning the argument; the point is exposing fake knowledge so that real inquiry can begin.

Socratic Irony

Socrates almost always claims to know nothing. He insists he is just asking questions, just trying to learn. He compares himself to a midwife: he doesn't give birth to ideas himself, he just helps others bring theirs to light.

Whether this is sincere is one of the oldest disputes in philosophy. He clearly knows enough to systematically demolish the views of confident experts. He has commitments — about virtue, about the soul, about the gods — that he sometimes states directly. So is the disclaimer of knowledge a real epistemic claim, or a tactical pose?

The most defensible reading is that Socrates draws a sharp distinction between knowledge in the strict sense (which would be complete, secure, and immune to refutation) and the kind of well-tested belief he himself has. He really doesn't have the first kind. He has plenty of the second kind, and he is willing to die for it.

The Core Doctrines

Several substantive positions show up across the early dialogues consistently enough to be plausibly Socratic rather than Platonic:

  • Virtue is knowledge. If someone really knew what was good, they could not fail to do it. Apparent moral weakness is actually moral ignorance.
  • No one does wrong willingly. A consequence of the above. People who act badly are confused about what would actually benefit them.
  • It is better to suffer wrong than to do it. The wrongdoer harms his own soul, which is a worse harm than any external suffering.
  • The care of the soul is the highest priority. More important than money, reputation, or even survival.

These claims are striking precisely because Socrates lived them. The Apology and Crito show what it looks like when someone acts on the conviction that doing wrong is worse than dying.

The Trial and Death

In 399 BCE, Socrates was tried before a jury of around 500 Athenians on two charges: impiety (not believing in the gods of the city, and introducing new divinities) and corrupting the youth. He was found guilty by a relatively narrow margin, and after his counter-proposal for a punishment was deemed insolent, he was sentenced to death. He drank the hemlock about a month later.

The political background matters. Athens had recently lost the Peloponnesian War. The brief, brutal regime of the Thirty Tyrants — several of whom had been close to Socrates — had been overthrown only five years earlier. Socrates was associated, fairly or not, with anti-democratic circles. The trial was probably not just about religion.

For the full story of the trial and what Socrates actually said in his defence, see our page on the Apology.

Why Socrates Still Matters

  • Philosophy as a way of life. Socrates is the model of a thinker for whom philosophy is not a profession but a daily practice. The ancient schools that came after — Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Skeptics — all claimed him as a forerunner.
  • The method, transposed. The Socratic method is the ancestor of dialectic, the legal cross-examination, the law-school case method, and the modern philosophical seminar.
  • The principled refusal. Socrates is the prototype of the citizen who refuses to do something he believes is wrong even when ordered by the state. That figure has been re-described by every major political tradition since.
  • The unsettling teacher. Anyone who has been the questioner or the questioned in a real Socratic exchange knows the distinctive discomfort: realising you held a view you cannot defend. That discomfort is the engine of philosophy.