Socrates is philosophy’s martyr. Sentenced to death in 399BC Athens for ‘corrupting the minds of the youth,’ Socrates never wrote anything down. We know of his era-defining thinking only through the writings of his contemporaries, particularly his student Plato.
Plato’s Socratic dialogues — some of the most wonderful works in the history of philosophy — feature Socrates in lively conversation on a wide range of subjects, from justice and virtue to art and politics. The central theme in Socrates's thinking, however, concerned the nature of knowledge — specifically, on how none of us really have any. As a statement often attributed to Socrates puts it:
True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.
During Socrates's life, the Oracle of Delphi proclaimed him the wisest of all people. Socrates, regularly declaring absolute ignorance as he did, could not agree. He therefore set out on a quest to find someone wiser to prove the Oracle wrong.
Ruffling influential feathers with the Socratic method
Socrates approached influential Athenians considered wise by the people of the day — statesmen, poets, and teachers. He conversed with these individuals using what is now known as the Socratic method, a form of cooperative dialogue that uses incisive questioning to stimulate critical thinking and draw out presuppositions.
A more straightforward way to think about the Socratic method is to imagine a relentlessly curious child asking ‘why’ after every single explanation an adult offers, seeking a truly foundational response to a question rather than an endless chain of unsatisfactory causal reasoning. Unfortunately for Socrates, being a quite famously ugly adult male, he was not afforded the same good grace a child might have been.
