Socrates
470–399 BC 8 entries
Biography
Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens, regarded as one of the founders of Western philosophy. The son of a stonemason and a midwife, he served as a foot soldier in the Peloponnesian War and spent his life in the streets and the marketplace of his city, questioning anyone willing to talk to him. His way of asking question after question until a confident answer fell apart is still known as the Socratic method. He wrote nothing himself: what we know of his thought comes above all from the dialogues of his pupil Plato, and from Xenophon and Aristophanes.
He said that his only wisdom lay in knowing that he knew nothing, and he taught that virtue is a kind of knowledge and that no one does wrong willingly. In 399 BC he was accused of impiety and of corrupting the young men of Athens, and he was sentenced to death. He refused to escape and drank the hemlock among his friends, a death Plato described in the Phaedo.
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