Socrates

is a founding figure in the history of Western philosophy, revered for his single-minded dedication to truth and virtue, for his great argumentative skill, and for his death, which came to be viewed as a martyrdom. As a result of his public philosophizing in Athens, he was sentenced to death by the city’s democratic government for “impiety” and “corrupting the youth.” He could have saved himself by promising to cease philosophizing or by escaping into exile, but he refused, preferring to drink the deadly hemlock out of respect for the law. Beyond his reputation as a philosophical hero, Socrates is important for reorienting Greek philosophy toward ethical concerns and indeed for insisting that the cultivation of virtue, the “care of the soul,” is overwhelmingly the most important obligation of every human being. He famously asserted at his trial, in defiance of his accusers, that the unexamined life is not worth living. His penetrating


style of exploring philosophical questions in conversation, typically exposing contradictions in the positions of his interlocutors, is called the Socratic method.

*Socrates wrote nothing.

*What is known of his views is inferred from, among other sources, the early dialogues of Plato, in which “Socrates” is the main character.

*Socrates held that virtue is a kind of knowledge and that anyone who knows what virtue is cannot help but act virtuously.