The implication that he was guided by something he regarded as divine or semi-divine was all the more reason for other Athenians to be suspicious of Socrates.
Socrates was usually to be found in the marketplace and other public areas, conversing with a variety of different people—young and old, male and female, slave and free, rich and poor—that is, with virtually anyone he could persuade to join with him in his question-and-answer mode of probing serious matters.
Socrates pursued this task single-mindedly, questioning people about what matters most, e. He did this regardless of whether his respondents wanted to be questioned or resisted him. The difficulties are increased because all those who knew and wrote about Socrates lived before any standardization of modern categories of, or sensibilities about, what constitutes historical accuracy or poetic license.
All authors present their own interpretations of the personalities and lives of their characters, whether they mean to or not, whether they write fiction or biography or philosophy if the philosophy they write has characters , so other criteria must be introduced for deciding among the contending views of who Socrates really was.
One thing is certain about the historical Socrates: even among those who knew him in life, there was profound disagreement about what his actual views and methods were. Our earliest extant source—and the only one who can claim to have known Socrates in his early years—is the playwright Aristophanes. His comedy, Clouds , was produced in when the other two writers of our extant sources, Xenophon and Plato, were infants. In the play, the character Socrates heads a Think-o-Rama in which young men study the natural world, from insects to stars, and study slick argumentative techniques as well, lacking all respect for the Athenian sense of propriety.
The actor wearing the mask of Socrates makes fun of the traditional gods of Athens lines —48, , —24 , mimicked later by the young protagonist, and gives naturalistic explanations of phenomena Athenians viewed as divinely directed lines —33; cf.
Theaetetus e, c—d, e—a; Phaedo 96a—a. Worst of all, he teaches dishonest techniques for avoiding repayment of debt lines — and encourages young men to beat their parents into submission lines — Thus, what had seemed comical a quarter century earlier, Socrates hanging in a basket on-stage, talking nonsense, was ominous in memory by then.
Comedy by its very nature is a tricky source for information about anyone. A good reason to believe that the representation of Socrates is not merely comic exaggeration but systematically misleading is that Clouds amalgamates in one character, Socrates, features now well known to be unique to other particular fifth-century intellectuals Dover , xxxii-lvii. That Socrates eschewed any earning potential in philosophy does not seem to have been significant to the great writer of comedies.
Aristophanes did not stop accusing Socrates in when Clouds placed third behind another play in which Socrates was mentioned as barefoot; rather, he soon began writing a revision, which he published but never produced. Aristophanes appears to have given up on reviving Clouds in about , but his attacks on Socrates continued.
Another source for the historical Socrates is the soldier-historian, Xenophon. Xenophon was a practical man whose ability to recognize philosophical issues is almost imperceptible, so it is plausible that his Socrates appears as such a practical and helpful advisor because that is the side of Socrates Xenophon witnessed. Although Xenophon tends to moralize and does not follow the superior conventions introduced by Thucydides, still it is sometimes argued that, having had no philosophical axes to grind, Xenophon may have presented a more accurate portrait of Socrates than Plato does.
He left Athens in on an expedition to Persia and, for a variety of reasons mercenary service for Thracians and Spartans; exile , never resided in Athens again. And now a third is in order. Philosophers have usually privileged the account of Socrates given by their fellow philosopher, Plato. Plato was about twenty-five when Socrates was tried and executed, and had probably known the old man most of his life.
The extant sources agree that Socrates was often to be found where youths of the city spent their time. The dialogues have dramatic dates that fall into place as one learns more about their characters and, despite incidental anachronisms, it turns out that there is more realism in the dialogues than most have suspected. It does not follow, however, that Plato represented the views and methods of Socrates or anyone, for that matter as he recalled them, much less as they were originally uttered.
There are a number of cautions and caveats that should be in place from the start. Even when a specific festival or other reference fixes the season or month of a dialogue, or birth of a character, one should imagine a margin of error.
Although it becomes obnoxious to use circa or plus-minus everywhere, the ancients did not require or desire contemporary precision in these matters. All the children born during a full year, for example, had the same nominal birthday, accounting for the conversation at Lysis b, odd by contemporary standards, in which two boys disagree about who is the elder. This is a way of asking a popular question, Why do history of philosophy? One might reply that our study of some of our philosophical predecessors is intrinsically valuable , philosophically enlightening and satisfying.
The truly great philosophers, and Plato was one of them, are still capable of becoming our companions in philosophical conversation, our dialectical partners. Because he addressed timeless, universal, fundamental questions with insight and intelligence, our own understanding of such questions is heightened. That explains Plato, one might say, but where is Socrates in this picture? Is he interesting merely as a predecessor to Plato? But how? That again is the Socratic problem.
Inconsistencies among the dialogues seem to demand explanation, though not all philosophers have thought so Shorey Most famously, the Parmenides attacks various theories of forms that the Republic , Symposium , and Phaedo develop and defend.
In some dialogues e. There are differences on smaller matters as well. A related problem is that some of the dialogues appear to develop positions familiar from other philosophical traditions e. Three centuries of efforts to solve the Socratic problem are summarized in the following supplementary document:. Contemporary efforts recycle bits and pieces—including the failures—of these older attempts. Until relatively recently in modern times, it was hoped that confident elimination of what could be ascribed purely to Socrates would leave standing a coherent set of doctrines attributable to Plato who appears nowhere in the dialogues as a speaker.
Many philosophers, inspired by the nineteenth century scholar Eduard Zeller, expect the greatest philosophers to promote grand, impenetrable schemes. Nothing of the sort was possible for Socrates, so it remained for Plato to be assigned all the positive doctrines that could be extracted from the dialogues.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, there was a resurgence of interest in who Socrates was and what his own views and methods were. The result is a narrower, but no less contentious, Socratic problem. Two strands of interpretation dominated views of Socrates in the twentieth century Griswold ; Klagge and Smith Although there has been some healthy cross-pollination and growth since the mid s, the two were so hostile to one another for so long that the bulk of the secondary literature on Socrates, including translations peculiar to each, still divides into two camps, hardly reading one another: literary contextualists and analysts.
The literary-contextual study of Socrates, like hermeneutics more generally, uses the tools of literary criticism—typically interpreting one complete dialogue at a time; its European origins are traced to Heidegger and earlier to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. The analytic study of Socrates, like analytic philosophy more generally, is fueled by the arguments in the texts—typically addressing a single argument or set of arguments, whether in a single text or across texts; its origins are in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition.
Hans-Georg Gadamer — was the doyen of the hermeneutic strand, and Gregory Vlastos — of the analytic. Thus terms, arguments, characters, and in fact all elements in the dialogues should be addressed in their literary context. For both varieties of contextualism, the Platonic dialogues are like a brilliant constellation whose separate stars naturally require separate focus. Marking the maturity of the literary contextualist tradition in the early twenty-first century is a greater diversity of approaches and an attempt to be more internally critical see Hyland Beginning in the s, Vlastos , 45—80 recommended a set of mutually supportive premises that together provide a plausible framework in the analytic tradition for Socratic philosophy as a pursuit distinct from Platonic philosophy.
The first premise marks a break with a tradition of regarding Plato as a dialectician who held his assumptions tentatively and revised them constantly; rather,. The evidence Vlastos uses varies for this claim, but is of several types: stylometric data, internal cross references, external events mentioned, differences in doctrines and methods featured, and other ancient testimony particularly that of Aristotle.
The result of applying the premises is a firm list contested, of course, by others of ten theses held by Socrates, all of which are incompatible with the corresponding ten theses held by Plato , 47— Many analytic ancient philosophers in the late twentieth century mined the gold Vlastos had uncovered, and many of those who were productive in the developmentalist vein in the early days went on to constructive work of their own see Bibliography.
It is a risky business to say where ancient philosophy is now, but an advantage of an entry in a dynamic reference work is that authors are allowed, nay, encouraged to update their entries to reflect recent scholarship and sea changes in their topics. To use them in that way is to announce in advance the results of a certain interpretation of the dialogues and to canonize that interpretation under the guise of a presumably objective order of composition—when in fact no such order is objectively known.
And it thereby risks prejudicing an unwary reader against the fresh, individual reading that these works demand. As in any peace agreement, it takes some time for all the combatants to accept that the conflict has ended—but that is where we are.
In short, one is now more free to answer, Who was Socrates really? In the smaller column on the right are dates of major events and persons familiar from fifth century Athenian history.
Although the dates are as precise as allowed by the facts, some are estimated and controversial Nails Assuming that his stoneworker father, Sophroniscus, kept to the conventions, he carried the infant around the hearth, thereby formally admitting him into the family, five days after he was born, named him on the tenth day, presented him to his phratry a regional hereditary association and took responsibility for socializing him into the various institutions proper to an Athenian male.
Athens was a city of numerous festivals, competitions, and celebrations, including the Panathenaea which attracted visitors to the city from throughout the Mediterranean. Like the Olympics, the Panathenaea was celebrated with special splendor at four-year intervals. This he delivered to Socrates in the presence of witnesses, instructing Socrates to present himself before the king archon within four days for a preliminary hearing the same magistrate would later preside at the pre-trial examination and the trial.
At the end of the Theaetetus , Socrates was on his way to that preliminary hearing. As a citizen, he had the right to countersue, the right to forgo the hearing, allowing the suit to proceed uncontested, and the right to exile himself voluntarily, as the personified laws later remind him Crito 52c.
Socrates availed himself of none of these rights of citizenship. Rather, he set out to enter a plea and stopped at a gymnasium to talk to some youngsters about mathematics and knowledge. This preliminary hearing designated the official receipt of the case and was intended to lead to greater precision in the formulation of the charge. In Athens, religion was a matter of public participation under law, regulated by a calendar of religious festivals; and the city used revenues to maintain temples and shrines.
Evidence for irreverence was of two types: Socrates did not believe in the gods of the Athenians indeed, he had said on many occasions that the gods do not lie or do other wicked things, whereas the Olympian gods of the poets and the city were quarrelsome and vindictive ; Socrates introduced new divinities indeed, he insisted that his daimonion had spoken to him since childhood.
It was linked with being good. However, Socrates was ugly, according to all accounts, a fact that made him a good target for Aristophanes in his comedies. Socrates was a great Greek philosopher, possibly the wisest sage of all time. He is famous for contributing to philosophy:. A discussion of Greek democracy often focuses on a sadder aspect of his life: his state-mandated execution. Although we have many details about his death, we know little about the life of Socrates.
Plato provides us the names of some of his family members: Socrates' father was Sophroniscus thought to have been a stonemason , his mother was Phaenarete, and his wife, Xanthippe a proverbial shrew. Socrates had 3 sons, Lamprocles, Sophroniscus, and Menexenus. The oldest, Lamprocles, was about 15 at the time his father died. The Council of [see Athenian Officials in the Time of Pericles] condemned Socrates to death for impiety for not believing in the gods of the city and for introducing new gods.
He was offered an alternative to death, paying a fine, but refused it. Socrates fulfilled his sentence by drinking a cup of poison hemlock in front of friends. Socrates is remembered chiefly as a philosopher and the teacher of Plato, but he was also a citizen of Athens, and served the military as a hoplite during the Peloponnesian War , at Potidaea — , where he saved Alcibiades ' life in a skirmish, Delium , where he remained calm while most around him were in a panic, and Amphipolis Socrates also participated in the Athenian democratic political organ, the Council of the The 5th century B.
Sophists taught valuable skills, especially rhetoric, for a price. Although Plato shows Socrates opposing the sophists, and not charging for his instruction, Aristophanes, in his comedy Clouds , portrays Socrates as a greedy master of the sophists' craft. Although Plato is considered the most reliable source on Socrates and he says Socrates was not a sophist, opinions differ on whether Socrates was essentially different from the other sophists.
Socrates is not known to have written anything. He is best known for the dialogues of Plato, but before Plato painted his memorable portrait in his dialogues, Socrates was an object of ridicule, described as a sophist, by Aristophanes.
After his trial, he compared his refusal to retreat from his legal troubles to a soldier's refusal to retreat from battle when threatened with death. Plato's Symposium provides the best details of Socrates' physical appearance. He was not the ideal of Athenian masculinity.
Short and stocky, with a snub nose and bulging eyes, Socrates always seemed to appear to be staring. However, Plato pointed out that in the eyes of his students, Socrates possessed a different kind of attractiveness, not based on a physical ideal but on his brilliant debates and penetrating thought. Socrates always emphasized the importance of the mind over the relative unimportance of the human body.
Socrates believed that philosophy should achieve practical results for the greater well-being of society. He attempted to establish an ethical system based on human reason rather than theological doctrine. Socrates pointed out that human choice was motivated by the desire for happiness. Ultimate wisdom comes from knowing oneself. The more a person knows, the greater his or her ability to reason and make choices that will bring true happiness.
Socrates believed that this translated into politics with the best form of government being neither a tyranny nor a democracy. Instead, government worked best when ruled by individuals who had the greatest ability, knowledge and virtue, and possessed a complete understanding of themselves.
For Socrates, Athens was a classroom and he went about asking questions of the elite and common man alike, seeking to arrive at political and ethical truths. In fact, he claimed to be ignorant because he had no ideas, but wise because he recognized his own ignorance. He asked questions of his fellow Athenians in a dialectic method — the Socratic Method — which compelled the audience to think through a problem to a logical conclusion.
Sometimes the answer seemed so obvious, it made Socrates' opponents look foolish. For this, his Socratic Method was admired by some and vilified by others.
During Socrates' life, Athens was going through a dramatic transition from hegemony in the classical world to its decline after a humiliating defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. Athenians entered a period of instability and doubt about their identity and place in the world. As a result, they clung to past glories, notions of wealth and a fixation on physical beauty. Socrates attacked these values with his insistent emphasis on the greater importance of the mind.
While many Athenians admired Socrates' challenges to Greek conventional wisdom and the humorous way he went about it, an equal number grew angry and felt he threatened their way of life and uncertain future. In B.
0コメント