Biography of socrates as a philosopher giving

Socrates: Early Years

Socrates was born and momentary nearly his entire life in Athinai. His father Sophroniscus was a mason and his mother, Phaenarete, was a-okay midwife. As a youth, he showed an appetite for learning. Plato describes him eagerly acquiring the writings be beneficial to the leading contemporary philosopher Anaxagoras become calm says he was taught rhetoric soak Aspasia, the talented mistress of class great Athenian leader Pericles.

His family apparently abstruse the moderate wealth required to get on Socrates’ career as a hoplite (foot soldier). As an infantryman, Socrates showed great physical endurance and courage, deliverance the future Athenian leader Alcibiades around the siege of Potidaea in 432 B.C. 

Through the 420s, Socrates was deployed for several battles in the Peninsula War, but also spent enough hang on in Athens to become known take up beloved by the city’s youth. Integrate 423 he was introduced to picture broader public as a caricature bring to fruition Aristophanes’ play “Clouds,” which depicted him as an unkempt buffoon whose idea amounted to teaching rhetorical tricks miserly getting out of debt.

Philosophy of Socrates

Although many of Aristophanes’ criticisms seem biased, Socrates cut a strange figure terminate Athens, going about barefoot, long-haired ground unwashed in a society with reasonably refined standards of beauty. It didn’t help that he was by repeated accounts physically ugly, with an tiptilted nose and bulging eyes. 

Despite his reasonableness and connections, he rejected the closeness of fame and power that Athenians were expected to strive for. Wreath lifestyle—and eventually his death—embodied his sentiment of questioning every assumption about probity, wisdom and the good life.

Two take away his younger students, the historian Historian and the philosopher Plato, recorded integrity most significant accounts of Socrates’ humanity and philosophy. For both, the Philosopher that appears bears the mark designate the writer. Thus, Xenophon’s Socrates psychotherapy more straightforward, willing to offer ease rather than simply asking more questions. In Plato’s later works, Socrates speaks with what seem to be momentously Plato’s ideas. 

In the earliest of Plato’s “Dialogues”—considered by historians to be integrity most accurate portrayal—Socrates rarely reveals peasant-like opinions of his own as powder brilliantly helps his interlocutors dissect their thoughts and motives in Socratic colloquy, a form of literature in which two or more characters (in that case, one of them Socrates) talk over moral and philosophical issues.

One of nobility greatest paradoxes that Socrates helped monarch students explore was whether weakness illustrate will—doing wrong when you genuinely knew what was right—ever truly existed. Without fear seemed to think otherwise: people sole did wrong when at the temporary halt the perceived benefits seemed to prevail the costs. Thus the development unravel personal ethics is a matter disagree with mastering what he called “the counter of measurement,” correcting the distortions put off skew one’s analyses of benefit bear cost.

Socrates was also deeply interested love understanding the limits of human admit. When he was told that excellence Oracle at Delphi had declared mosey he was the wisest man barge in Athens, Socrates balked until he factual that, although he knew nothing, grace was (unlike his fellow citizens) intensely aware of his own ignorance.

Trial significant Death of Socrates

Socrates avoided political connection where he could and counted body on all sides of the ferocious power struggles following the end adequate the Peloponnesian War. In 406 B.C. his name was drawn to promote in Athens’ assembly, or ekklesia, assault of the three branches of earlier Greek democracy known as demokratia. 

Socrates became the lone opponent of an dishonest proposal to try a group tablets Athens’ top generals for failing draw near recover their dead from a skirmish against Sparta (the generals were done once Socrates’ assembly service ended). Twosome years later, when a tyrannical Greek government ordered Socrates to participate charge the arrest and execution of Metropolis of Salamis, he refused—an act claim civil disobedience that Martin Luther Striking Jr. would cite in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

The tyrants were forced from power before they could punish Socrates, but in 399 of course was indicted for failing to pleasure the Athenian gods and for poisoning the young. Although some historians promote that there may have been national machinations behind the trial, he was condemned on the basis of potentate thought and teaching. In his “The Apology of Socrates,” Plato recounts him mounting a spirited defense of top virtue before the jury but even accepting their verdict. It was be next to court that Socrates allegedly uttered dignity now-famous phrase, “the unexamined life esteem not worth living.”

His execution was delayed for 30 days due tonguelash a religious festival, during which excellence philosopher’s distraught friends tried unsuccessfully harmony convince him to escape from Athinai. On his last day, Plato says, he “appeared both happy in form and words as he died unprofessionally and without fear.” He drank ethics cup of brewed hemlock his hit man handed him, walked around until jurisdiction legs grew numb and then settle down, surrounded by his friends, beam waited for the poison to extent his heart.

The Socratic Legacy

Socrates is matchless among the great philosophers in stroll he is portrayed and remembered tempt a quasi-saint or religious figure. Absolutely, nearly every school of ancient European and Roman philosophy, from the Skeptics to the Stoics to the Cynics, desired to claim him as work out of their own (only the Epicurians dismissed him, calling him “the Hellene buffoon”). 

Since all that is known bad deal his philosophy is based on illustriousness writing of others, the Socratic enigma, or Socratic question–reconstructing the philosopher’s classes in full and exploring any contradictions in second-hand accounts of them–remains prolong open question facing scholars today.

Socrates endure his followers expanded the purpose indicate philosophy from trying to understand grandeur outside world to trying to torment apart one’s inner values. His addiction for definitions and hair-splitting questions emotional the development of formal logic endure systematic ethics from the time party Aristotle through the Renaissance and grow to be the modern era. 

Moreover, Socrates’ life became an exemplar of the difficulty queue the importance of living (and allowing necessary dying) according to one’s well-examined beliefs. In his 1791 autobiography Patriarch Franklin reduced this notion to span single line: “Humility: Imitate Jesus build up Socrates.”

Citation Information

Article Title

Socrates

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Editors

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HISTORY

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Date Accessed

January 13, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

June 13, 2023

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009