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Ethics & Dialectic
Socrates
470 BC – 399 BC
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
The gadfly of Athens who never wrote a word, yet whose questions reshaped Western thought. Socrates practised philosophy as a form of moral midwifery, drawing truth from others through relentless dialogue.
Biography
Socrates (c. 470–399 BC) is one of the founders of Western philosophy. Unlike his predecessors, he turned philosophical inquiry away from cosmology and toward ethics and the human soul. He left no writings of his own; his ideas survive through the dialogues of his student Plato.
Socrates developed the elenctic method—a form of cooperative argument aimed at exposing inconsistencies in his interlocutors' beliefs. He believed that virtue is knowledge, and that wrongdoing is therefore a form of ignorance.
In 399 BC, he was tried by an Athenian jury on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. He was found guilty and sentenced to death by hemlock. His willingness to accept the sentence rather than compromise his principles became one of philosophy's most enduring images of intellectual integrity.
Important Works
The Apology (via Plato)
399 BCSocrates' defence speech at his trial, presenting his philosophical mission as a divine calling.
Euthyphro (via Plato)
399 BCAn examination of the nature of piety and whether the gods approve of things because they are good.
Key Takeaways
- Know thyself — self-knowledge is the foundation of all wisdom.
- Virtue is knowledge; evil is ignorance of the good.
- The unexamined life is not worth living.
- True wisdom begins in recognising what you do not know.
- Philosophy is a form of practice, not merely theory.