Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

SUBSCRIBE NOW

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Philosophy Then

Who Speaks For Socrates?

Peter Adamson finds Socrates speaking for everyone else.

Socrates is the ventriloquist’s dummy of ancient philosophy. He practiced philosophy as a form of conversation, and did not write it down, leaving others to tell us what he was like and what sorts of things he said. Three of his contemporaries are the most important sources for his thought: the comic poet Aristophanes, who satirized Socrates in his play The Clouds, the historian Xenophon, who wrote several works commemorating Socrates’ conversations, and of course Plato. For most of us, and for the subsequent history of philosophy, the Socrates who counts is Plato’s Socrates: barefoot, ugly, ironic, and relentlessly questioning his fellow citizens in a forever frustrated attempt to learn what virtue is. He’s living the examined life, but his examinations never bring him knowledge: apart, of course, from the knowledge that he knows nothing.

…