Socrates the Public Philosopher

The History and Myths Behind Philosophy as We Know It

“Alcibiades being taught by Socrates” by François-André Vincent

For every philosopher, Socrates (469-399 B.C.) is a model. He is the one who is considered to have given birth to the discipline that we know today as philosophy.

Of course, there were thinkers before Socrates, what we call the pre-Socratic philosophers. They made important contributions to metaphysics, cosmology, and epistemology. However, Socrates made a crucial shift by grounding philosophical inquiry in a broader way. His approach redefined the role of philosophy in public discourse and shaped its trajectory in ways that profoundly influenced later thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle. Thus, there is a before and an after Socrates in the sense that we can say that without Socrates there would be no philosophy as we know it.

But Socrates is largely a mythical figure. He is also one of a few rare cases in history where a philosopher did not write anything. This can be confusing since his name often appears on the cover of books. At your local bookstore, if you find a piece of text with “Socrates” as the author’s name, you can safely assume that someone — a publisher, an author, or someone else — is trying to lure you in.

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Everything we know about Socrates has been told to us by someone else. Our best teacher about Socrates is the famous Plato (429?-347 B.C.). Because of this, we only have secondhand accounts of Socrates’ teachings and only a small portion at that.

In Plato’s writings, Socrates seems to be the main protagonist; the archetypal figure of what a philosopher is, or at least what a philosopher was thought to be for a very long time.

In this article, I would like to introduce you to the man, the myth, and the model that Socrates represents. I will begin with a brief overview of what we know about him. I will introduce you to what specialists call “the Socratic problem.” Then I will present an important episode in his life, both as a man and as a philosopher: his trial and death sentence.