Socrates was a Greek Athenian philosopher.
He is best
known outside
philosophy for being condemned to death by an Athenian people's court and choosing to die by drinking hemlock. He had been charged with impiety and of "corrupting" Athenian youth through his teachings <1> and had been given the opportunity to go into exile. However, he chose to die as sentenced as he believed he would otherwise dishonor the agreement he had willingly made to abide by the laws of Athens.
Life Most of what is now known about Socrates is derived from information that recurs across various secondary sources: the dialogues written by Plato, one of Socrates' students; the works of Xenophon, one of his contemporaries; and writings by Aristophanes and Aristotle. Anything Socrates wrote himself has not survived. Aristophanes was a noted satirist, so his accounts of Socrates may well be biased, exaggerated or even totally falsified; another complication is the Ancient Greek tradition of scholars attributing their own ideas, theories and sometimes even personal traits to their mentors, a tradition Plato appears to have followed. Gabriele Giannantoni, in his monumental 1991 work Socratis et Socraticorum Reliquiae, attempts to compile every scrap of evidence regarding Socrates, including material attributed to Aeschines Socraticus, Antisthenes and a number of others supposed to have known him.
Socratic method
Perhaps his most important contribution to Western thought is his dialectic (answering a
question with a question) method of inquiry, known as the Socratic Method or method of elenchos, which he largely applied to the examination of key
moral concepts such as the Good and Justice, concepts used constantly without any real definition. It was first described by Plato in the Socratic Dialogues. For this, Socrates is customarily regarded as the father of political philosophy and ethics or moral philosophy, and as a fountainhead of all the main themes in Western philosophy in general.
In this method, a series of questions are posed to help a person or group to determine their underlying
beliefs and the extent of their knowledge. The Socratic method is a negative method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those which lead to contradictions. It was designed to force one to examine his own beliefs and the validity of such beliefs. In fact, Socrates once said, "I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others"