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Join us for an engaging exploration of Socrates' life, trial, and death, and discover the significance of his ideas that continue to shape Western philosophy...
Aug 11, 2024 · The defendant, Socrates, was a 70-year-old philosopher whose teachings profoundly influenced the city’s youth and intellectual landscape. His execution by drinking poison hemlock remains a poignant episode in Western philosophy. Understanding why Athens killed Socrates reveals much about its sociopolitical and cultural dynamics.
- Socrates: Early Years
- Philosophy of Socrates
- Trial and Death of Socrates
- The Socratic Legacy
Socrates was born and lived nearly his entire life in Athens. His father Sophroniscus was a stonemason and his mother, Phaenarete, was a midwife. As a youth, he showed an appetite for learning. Plato describes him eagerly acquiring the writings of the leading contemporary philosopher Anaxagoras and says he was taught rhetoric by Aspasia, the talent...
Although many of Aristophanes’ criticisms seem unfair, Socrates cut a strange figure in Athens, going about barefoot, long-haired and unwashed in a society with incredibly refined standards of beauty. It didn’t help that he was by all accounts physically ugly, with an upturned nose and bulging eyes. Despite his intellect and connections, he rejecte...
Socrates avoided political involvement where he could and counted friends on all sides of the fierce power struggles following the end of the Peloponnesian War. In 406 B.C. his name was drawn to serve in Athens’ assembly, or ekklesia, one of the three branches of ancient Greek democracyknown as demokratia. Socrates became the lone opponent of an il...
Socrates is unique among the great philosophers in that he is portrayed and remembered as a quasi-saint or religious figure. Indeed, nearly every school of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, from the Skeptics to the Stoics to the Cynics, desired to claim him as one of their own (only the Epicurians dismissed him, calling him “the Athenian buffoon”...
Sep 10, 2024 · Socrates (born c. 470 bce, Athens [Greece]—died 399 bce, Athens) was an ancient Greek philosopher whose way of life, character, and thought exerted a profound influence on Classical antiquity and Western philosophy. Socrates was a widely recognized and controversial figure in his native Athens, so much so that he was frequently mocked in the ...
- Richard Kraut
- Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher, one of the three greatest figures of the ancient period of Western philosophy (the others were Plato and...
- Socrates professed not to teach anything (and indeed not to know anything important) but only to seek answers to urgent human questions (e.g., “Wha...
- Socrates wrote nothing. All that is known about him has been inferred from accounts by members of his circle—primarily Plato and Xenophon—as well a...
- Socrates was widely hated in Athens, mainly because he regularly embarrassed people by making them appear ignorant and foolish. He was also an outs...
- Socrates could have saved himself. He chose to go to trial rather than enter voluntary exile. In his defense speech, he rebutted some but not all e...
Sep 16, 2005 · The philosopher Socrates remains, as he was in his lifetime (469–399 B.C.E.), [1] an enigma, an inscrutable individual who, despite having written nothing, is considered one of the handful of philosophers who forever changed how philosophy itself was to be conceived. All our information about him is second-hand and most of it vigorously ...
Apr 11, 2023 · Article. The Last Days of Socrates is a modern-day title for the collection of four Socratic dialogues by the Greek philosopher Plato – the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo – telling the story of the trial, imprisonment, and death of Socrates and presenting Plato's vision of the ideal philosopher and a life lived in pursuit of ultimate ...
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Socrates, often hailed as the father of Western philosophy, was a figure whose ideas and methods have profoundly shaped the course of human thought. Born in the 5th century BC in Athens, Greece, Socrates never wrote down his teachings, yet his philosophical inquiries laid the groundwork for much of Western logic and moral philosophy. His life and teachings, passed down through the writings of ...
