Socrates · Philosophy
Socrates’s revolutionary way of philosophizing - not by lecturing but by relentless questioning, exposing the contradictions in what people only thought they knew.
Socrates did something no philosopher had done before: he philosophized not by proclaiming doctrines but by asking questions. He wrote nothing, founded no school of dogma, and claimed to teach nothing. Instead, he wandered the marketplace of Athens, engaging anyone who would talk - politicians, poets, craftsmen, the young, the famous - in conversation, asking them to explain what they claimed to know. What is justice? What is courage? What is piety? What is virtue? When they gave confident answers, he questioned those answers, drawing out their implications, testing them against examples, until the confident expert was forced to admit that their definition collapsed in contradiction - that they did not, after all, really know what they had been so sure of. This method of relentless, probing questioning, designed to examine and test what people believe, is the Socratic method (or elenchus, ‘refutation’), and it transformed philosophy forever.
The immediate effect of the Socratic method was to expose false knowledge - to reveal that people who confidently believed they understood justice, courage, or virtue could not actually give a coherent account of these things when pressed. The politician sure he knew what justice was, the general certain he understood courage, the priest confident in his grasp of piety - each, under Socrates’s patient questioning, would offer a definition, see it refuted by a counterexample, offer another, see it refuted in turn, and eventually be reduced to bewildered admission that they did not know what they were talking about. This experience was often deeply uncomfortable, even humiliating, and it made Socrates many enemies; he compared himself to a ‘gadfly’ stinging the sluggish horse of Athens, and to a ‘torpedo fish’ that numbs those it touches, leaving them perplexed. But the discomfort served a purpose: only when people recognized that they did not know what they thought they knew could the genuine search for knowledge begin.
Socrates’s questions had a characteristic form: he asked for definitions - not examples of just acts but the definition of justice itself, not instances of courage but what courage is, the single common feature present in all cases of the virtue. When someone answered ‘justice is paying your debts’ or ‘courage is standing firm in battle,’ Socrates would object that this gives an example, not a definition, and that there are just acts that are not paying debts and courageous acts that are not standing in battle. He was seeking the universal - the essential nature or form that all instances of a thing share, which makes them instances of that thing. This search for universal definitions, for the essence behind the examples, was a profound philosophical innovation; Aristotle credited Socrates with two great contributions to philosophy: inductive arguments and universal definitions. The quest to define the virtues, to grasp what justice or goodness essentially is, would launch the entire tradition of Western philosophical inquiry into the nature of things.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned how Socrates pursued truth by questioning every assumption until contradictions appeared. Two thousand years later, Descartes pursued certainty by a similar method of radical doubt. State how Descartes turned doubt into a tool.
Leads to Rene Descartes.
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