Socrates

In Ancient Greece there were lots of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists. A pretty well known Greek philosopher is Socrates. Even though Socrates rarely wrote down his thoughts and things about himself, we still have a lot of information about him from other philosophers he interacted with. Our main such resource is his student Plato. Plato only wrote in dialogue, meaning he wrote his thoughts as if Socrates was talking to someone about it. Because of this most of what we know about Socrates is from him taking to someone like his brother Glaucon. We do know from this, despite Plato’s own thoughts that he wrote as Socrates’, that he would teach people in Athens, where he lived, about philosophy and math. He’s best known for his style of teaching, which we still use today and call the Socratic method. The Socratic method is where you know the answer to something and get another person to believe the same thing by asking them questions about how they know what they know. An overly simplistic example of this would be: Socrates said “What is one plus one?” Glaucon answered “Three” “How do you know that?” Socrates replied. “Well” Glaucon reasoned. “One pebble and one pebble together would be… two pebbles! I was wrong about it being three”. The reason Socrates did this was that if you just tell someone the answer they might disbelieve you and think you’re being rude about it, but if they come up with the answer themselves they think it’s true and they are still on good terms with you. His most famous idea and concept in philosophy was that all physical things are merely poor representations of real things. In the same way we think of shadows as very poor representations of objects, Socrates believed physical objects are very poor representations of true ideas. An example of this would be if there was a perfect idea of a chair. Well, compared to this any chair you find will be a poor version of this perfect chair. Because his Socratic method ended up questioning the elite rulers of Athens and the gods themselves too much when he applied his method to them Aristophanes, a very wealthy and elite philosopher, decided to put Socrates to death. He was able to very easily convince the other elite to execute Socrates. The charges he was executed under was corrupting the youth and questioning the gods. The method of execution was poison that they made Socrates drink. Socrates would’ve easily managed to escape with the help of his students, namely Plato, but Socrates said he wanted to make the elite carry their threat out and to let them know there were consequences for their actions. Socrates did drink the poison and die but his legacy still lives with the Socratic method and in philosophy.