socrates' philosophy of education summary

Socrates’ Influence on Educational Philosophy

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Have you ever considered the origins of the modern educational system? While it has evolved through centuries, the roots of critical thinking and self-discovery in learning can be traced back to ancient Greece. One pivotal figure in this lineage is Socrates , a philosopher whose ideas continue to influence contemporary education. Let’s dive into how Socrates turned the classical world’s approach to learning on its head and how his methods continue to resonate with educators and students alike.

Socrates and the Art of Questioning

Socrates was not one to lecture his students on the truths of the universe. Instead, he led them on a journey of inquiry through his famous method of questioning. This dialectical method, often termed the Socratic Method , involves probing discussions where questions lead to further questions, driving deeper into the heart of the matter. What makes this approach so revolutionary, and how does it fit into our classrooms today?

• Encouraging Critical Thinking : Socrates believed that through questioning, students would not just learn information but learn how to think. This emphasis on critical thinking aims to develop the ability to analyze and evaluate ideas independently.
• Problem-Solving Skills : By continually asking questions, students learn to navigate through complex problems, a skill highly valued in today’s dynamic world.

The Socratic Method in Modern Education

Modern educators often use the Socratic Method to stimulate critical thinking and dialogue among students. It’s common in law schools, where students dissect cases, but it’s also found its way into various disciplines, from humanities to the sciences. Teachers pose open-ended questions, guiding students to explore concepts and find the answers for themselves.

Self-Knowledge and Personal Growth

“Know thyself,” a maxim often attributed to Socrates, underscores the philosopher’s belief in self-knowledge as the foundation of wisdom. He challenged his students to reflect on their beliefs and values, leading to personal growth and self-improvement. How does this ancient principle hold up in the modern educational landscape?

• Reflective Learning : Educational systems today encourage reflective learning, where students assess their understanding and beliefs, much like Socratic introspection.
• Personal Engagement with Learning : By fostering a connection between the material and the self, students are more engaged and motivated in their educational journey.

Fostering Independence in Learners

In a Socratic environment, students are not passive recipients of knowledge. They are active participants, driving their own learning experience. This independence in learning is a cornerstone of educational philosophies that focus on student-centred learning, a prevalent approach in many of today’s classrooms.

The Legacy of Socrates in Education

The influence of Socrates extends beyond the confines of philosophy; it permeates the very fabric of educational theory and practice. By encouraging open dialogue, critical examination, and a relentless quest for understanding, Socrates has left a legacy that continues to shape the minds of learners and educators.

• Active Learning : The Socratic emphasis on active participation has been a driving force behind the active learning movement, which prioritizes engagement and practical application of knowledge over rote memorization.
• Democratic Education : Socrates’ method of equal dialogue between teacher and student has influenced democratic education models that value the voices and contributions of all students in the learning process.

Challenges and Adaptations

While the Socratic Method has its strengths, it also presents challenges in modern education. Not all students may feel comfortable speaking up in a Socratic dialogue, and educators must adapt the method to ensure inclusivity and support diverse learning styles. The use of smaller group discussions and one-on-one mentoring are some adaptations that maintain the spirit of Socratic questioning while catering to individual needs.

Through his unique approach to learning, Socrates has left an indelible mark on the field of education. His emphasis on critical thinking, self-knowledge, and the pursuit of truth has influenced educational philosophies for millennia. By adopting and adapting his methods, modern education continues to benefit from the wisdom of this ancient philosopher.

What do you think? How can the Socratic Method be adapted to suit the diverse needs of today’s students? Is there a place for Socratic principles in our increasingly digital and information-saturated world?

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Western Philosophy

1 Characteristics of Western Philosophy

• Brief History of Western Philosophy
• Characteristics of Western Philosophy
• Critical Constructions of Western Philosophy

2 Divisions of Western Philosophy

• Pre-Socratic Period
• The Socratic Age
• Epicureans, Stoics, and Neo-Platonism
• Medieval Scholasticism
• Renaissance Humanism
• Rationalism and Empiricism
• Enlightenment
• Contemporary Schools of Thought

3 Major Issues of Western Philosophy

• Issues discussed in various branches of Western philosophy
• Metaphysical and Epistemological Issues
• Methods used in Western philosophy

4 Major Thinkers of Western Philosophy

• Greek Thinkers
• Modern Philosophers
• Contemporary Thinkers

5 Pre-Socratic Philosophers

• The ‘Sensualist School’: The Ionians
• The ‘Rationalist School’: The Eleatics
• An Attempt At Synthesis: The Atomists
• The Pythagorean Brotherhood
• The Sophists
• The Socratic Dialectical Method
• Systematic Divisions of Socrates’ Philosophy
• The Educational Philosophy of Socrates
• Learning about Socrates From his Followers
• A Critique of the Socratic Dialectical Method
• Introduction to His Thoughts
• Plato’s Dualism
• Seeking Goodness and Truth
• Plato on the Importance of Philosophy
• Criticism and Comment

8 Aristotle

• Metaphysics
• Classification of Sciences
• Theology – Nature of God
• Biology – Body and Soul

9 Augustine

• Epistemology
• Concept of Man
• Concept of God
• The Problem of Evil
• Political Thought

10 Thomas Aquinas

• Theory of Knowledge
• Philosophy of World
• Philosophy of the Human Soul and Goal of human life
• Philosophy of God
• Faith and Reason

11 Duns Scotus

• Proofs for the Existence of God
• The Unicity of God
• Scotus on Simplicity
• Significance of Metaphysics
• Relation Between Philosophy and Theology

12 Jewish and Islamic Philosophers

• Characteristics of Medieval Jewish Philosophy
• Medieval Jewish Philosophers
• The Origins of Islamic Philosophy
• Medieval Islamic Philosophers
• Western Arab Philosophers

13 Rationalism

• Intuition and Deduction
• Innate Ideas Factitious Ideas Adventitious Ideas
• Doubt: Methodological Scepticism
• Attributes and Modes: Mind/Body Dualism
• After Descartes

14 Empiricism

• Attacks upon Descartes Theory of Innate Ideas
• Sense Perception: Impressions and Ideas
• The Psychological Laws of Association of Ideas
• Matters of Fact and Relations of Ideas
• The Limits of Knowledge

15 Immanuel Kant

• Method of Kant
• Kant’s Philosophy of Knowledge
• Kant’s Philosophy of God
• Moral Philosophy of Kant
• Hegel’s Metaphysical Foundations
• ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ and Concept of Absolute
• ‘The Philosophy of Nature’ and Organic System
• ‘Philosophy of Spirit’ and Dialectic Method
• Hegel’ Contribution to Philosophy

17 Masters of Suspicion (Marx, Freud and Nietzsche)

• Karl Marx: Critic of Systemic Domination
• Sigmund Freud: Analyst of Human Psyche
• Friedrich Nietzsche: Unsympathetic Detractor

18 Pragmatism

• A Historical Overview
• Some Pragmatist Themes and Theses
• A Method and a Maxim
• Anti-Cartesianism
• The Kantian Inheritance
• Against the Spectator Theory of Knowledge
• Beyond the Correspondence Theory of Truth

19 Process Philosophy

• The Sitz im Leben of Process Philosophy
• An Inevitable Shift in Methodology
• Philosophy of Organism
• Fundamental Reality in Whitehead
• God and the Metaphysics of Becoming

20 Philosophy of Language

• Gottlob Frege
• Bertrand Russell
• Ludwig Wittgenstein

21 Phenomenology

• Introducing Phenomenology
• The Story of Phenomenology
• The Method of Phenomenology
• Intentionality of Consciousness
• The Meaning of Essence
• Eidetic Reduction
• Bracketing (Epoché)
• Period of Pure Phenomenology

22 Existentialism

• Introducing Existentialism
• General Background of Existentialism
• Sources of Existentialism
• General Characteristics of Existentialism
• Important Themes in Existentialism

23 Hermeneutics and Postmodernism

• Basic Description of Hermeneutics and Postmodernism
• Hermeneutics: Major Thinkers and Their Contribution
• Primary Themes Within Hermeneutics
• Postmodernism: Major Thinkers and Their Contribution
• Primary Themes Within Postmodernism

24 Neo-scholasticism and Feminism

• Traditional Elements
• Adaptation to Modern Needs
• Prominent Neo-Scholastics
• General Characteristics of Feminist Thought
• Historical Definitions
• Some Feminist Philosophers
• Need for Indian Feminist Philosophy

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What Is a Socratic Education?

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This chapter explores the controversial educational methods of the historic Socrates. It begins by highlighting the historic context within which Socrates’ educational methods emerged and emphasizes the ways his methods diverged from standard Athenian educational methods. Then, it clarifies the Socratic methodology employed by the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues with an emphasis placed on his elenchus . With this, the ways Socrates stands apart from educators of his time and the present become clear. Against those who take teaching to be a transfer of knowledge, Socrates suggests that teaching ought to not take this form. Instead, Socrates suggests education should involve one confronting their beliefs and scrutinizing them. Upon scrutinization, one can begin to obtain knowledge. At times this will appear painful, but this too seems to be a part of Socrates’ methodology.

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Considering the “Socratic Method” When Teaching the Odyssey and Iliad at the Socrates and Koraes Greek American Schools

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Curcio, H. (2023). What Is a Socratic Education?. In: Geier, B.A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Thinkers . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81037-5_16-1

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Philosophy of Education

Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and its influence so profound, the subject is wide-ranging, involving issues in ethics and social/political philosophy, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and language, and other areas of philosophy. Because it looks both inward to the parent discipline and outward to educational practice and the social, legal, and institutional contexts in which it takes place, philosophy of education concerns itself with both sides of the traditional theory/practice divide. Its subject matter includes both basic philosophical issues (e.g., the nature of the knowledge worth teaching, the character of educational equality and justice, etc.) and problems concerning specific educational policies and practices (e.g., the desirability of standardized curricula and testing, the social, economic, legal and moral dimensions of specific funding arrangements, the justification of curriculum decisions, etc.). In all this the philosopher of education prizes conceptual clarity, argumentative rigor, the fair-minded consideration of the interests of all involved in or affected by educational efforts and arrangements, and informed and well-reasoned valuation of educational aims and interventions.

Philosophy of education has a long and distinguished history in the Western philosophical tradition, from Socrates’ battles with the sophists to the present day. Many of the most distinguished figures in that tradition incorporated educational concerns into their broader philosophical agendas (Curren 2000, 2018; Rorty 1998). While that history is not the focus here, it is worth noting that the ideals of reasoned inquiry championed by Socrates and his descendants have long informed the view that education should foster in all students, to the extent possible, the disposition to seek reasons and the ability to evaluate them cogently, and to be guided by their evaluations in matters of belief, action and judgment. This view, that education centrally involves the fostering of reason or rationality, has with varying articulations and qualifications been embraced by most of those historical figures; it continues to be defended by contemporary philosophers of education as well (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2007, 2017). As with any philosophical thesis it is controversial; some dimensions of the controversy are explored below.

This entry is a selective survey of important contemporary work in Anglophone philosophy of education; it does not treat in detail recent scholarship outside that context.

1. Problems in Delineating the Field

2. analytic philosophy of education and its influence, 3.1 the content of the curriculum and the aims and functions of schooling, 3.2 social, political and moral philosophy, 3.3 social epistemology, virtue epistemology, and the epistemology of education, 3.4 philosophical disputes concerning empirical education research, 4. concluding remarks, other internet resources, related entries.

The inward/outward looking nature of the field of philosophy of education alluded to above makes the task of delineating the field, of giving an over-all picture of the intellectual landscape, somewhat complicated (for a detailed account of this topography, see Phillips 1985, 2010). Suffice it to say that some philosophers, as well as focusing inward on the abstract philosophical issues that concern them, are drawn outwards to discuss or comment on issues that are more commonly regarded as falling within the purview of professional educators, educational researchers, policy-makers and the like. (An example is Michael Scriven, who in his early career was a prominent philosopher of science; later he became a central figure in the development of the field of evaluation of educational and social programs. See Scriven 1991a, 1991b.) At the same time, there are professionals in the educational or closely related spheres who are drawn to discuss one or another of the philosophical issues that they encounter in the course of their work. (An example here is the behaviorist psychologist B.F. Skinner, the central figure in the development of operant conditioning and programmed learning, who in works such as Walden Two (1948) and Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1972) grappled—albeit controversially—with major philosophical issues that were related to his work.)

What makes the field even more amorphous is the existence of works on educational topics, written by well-regarded philosophers who have made major contributions to their discipline; these educational reflections have little or no philosophical content, illustrating the truth that philosophers do not always write philosophy. However, despite this, works in this genre have often been treated as contributions to philosophy of education. (Examples include John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education [1693] and Bertrand Russell’s rollicking pieces written primarily to raise funds to support a progressive school he ran with his wife. (See Park 1965.)

Finally, as indicated earlier, the domain of education is vast, the issues it raises are almost overwhelmingly numerous and are of great complexity, and the social significance of the field is second to none. These features make the phenomena and problems of education of great interest to a wide range of socially-concerned intellectuals, who bring with them their own favored conceptual frameworks—concepts, theories and ideologies, methods of analysis and argumentation, metaphysical and other assumptions, and the like. It is not surprising that scholars who work in this broad genre also find a home in the field of philosophy of education.

As a result of these various factors, the significant intellectual and social trends of the past few centuries, together with the significant developments in philosophy, all have had an impact on the content of arguments and methods of argumentation in philosophy of education—Marxism, psycho-analysis, existentialism, phenomenology, positivism, post-modernism, pragmatism, neo-liberalism, the several waves of feminism, analytic philosophy in both its ordinary language and more formal guises, are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Conceptual analysis, careful assessment of arguments, the rooting out of ambiguity, the drawing of clarifying distinctions—all of which are at least part of the philosophical toolkit—have been respected activities within philosophy from the dawn of the field. No doubt it somewhat over-simplifies the complex path of intellectual history to suggest that what happened in the twentieth century—early on, in the home discipline itself, and with a lag of a decade or more in philosophy of education—is that philosophical analysis came to be viewed by some scholars as being the major philosophical activity (or set of activities), or even as being the only viable or reputable activity. In any case, as they gained prominence and for a time hegemonic influence during the rise of analytic philosophy early in the twentieth century analytic techniques came to dominate philosophy of education in the middle third of that century (Curren, Robertson, & Hager 2003).

The pioneering work in the modern period entirely in an analytic mode was the short monograph by C.D. Hardie, Truth and Fallacy in Educational Theory (1941; reissued in 1962). In his Introduction, Hardie (who had studied with C.D. Broad and I.A. Richards) made it clear that he was putting all his eggs into the ordinary-language-analysis basket:

The Cambridge analytical school, led by Moore, Broad and Wittgenstein, has attempted so to analyse propositions that it will always be apparent whether the disagreement between philosophers is one concerning matters of fact, or is one concerning the use of words, or is, as is frequently the case, a purely emotive one. It is time, I think, that a similar attitude became common in the field of educational theory. (Hardie 1962: xix)

About a decade after the end of the Second World War the floodgates opened and a stream of work in the analytic mode appeared; the following is merely a sample. D. J. O’Connor published An Introduction to Philosophy of Education (1957) in which, among other things, he argued that the word “theory” as it is used in educational contexts is merely a courtesy title, for educational theories are nothing like what bear this title in the natural sciences. Israel Scheffler, who became the paramount philosopher of education in North America, produced a number of important works including The Language of Education (1960), which contained clarifying and influential analyses of definitions (he distinguished reportive, stipulative, and programmatic types) and the logic of slogans (often these are literally meaningless, and, he argued, should be seen as truncated arguments), Conditions of Knowledge (1965), still the best introduction to the epistemological side of philosophy of education, and Reason and Teaching (1973 [1989]), which in a wide-ranging and influential series of essays makes the case for regarding the fostering of rationality/critical thinking as a fundamental educational ideal (cf. Siegel 2016). B. O. Smith and R. H. Ennis edited the volume Language and Concepts in Education (1961); and R.D. Archambault edited Philosophical Analysis and Education (1965), consisting of essays by a number of prominent British writers, most notably R. S. Peters (whose status in Britain paralleled that of Scheffler in the United States), Paul Hirst, and John Wilson. Topics covered in the Archambault volume were typical of those that became the “bread and butter” of analytic philosophy of education (APE) throughout the English-speaking world—education as a process of initiation, liberal education, the nature of knowledge, types of teaching, and instruction versus indoctrination.

Among the most influential products of APE was the analysis developed by Hirst and Peters (1970) and Peters (1973) of the concept of education itself. Using as a touchstone “normal English usage,” it was concluded that a person who has been educated (rather than instructed or indoctrinated) has been (i) changed for the better; (ii) this change has involved the acquisition of knowledge and intellectual skills and the development of understanding; and (iii) the person has come to care for, or be committed to, the domains of knowledge and skill into which he or she has been initiated. The method used by Hirst and Peters comes across clearly in their handling of the analogy with the concept of “reform”, one they sometimes drew upon for expository purposes. A criminal who has been reformed has changed for the better, and has developed a commitment to the new mode of life (if one or other of these conditions does not hold, a speaker of standard English would not say the criminal has been reformed). Clearly the analogy with reform breaks down with respect to the knowledge and understanding conditions. Elsewhere Peters developed the fruitful notion of “education as initiation”.

The concept of indoctrination was also of great interest to analytic philosophers of education, for, it was argued, getting clear about precisely what constitutes indoctrination also would serve to clarify the border that demarcates it from acceptable educational processes. Thus, whether or not an instructional episode was a case of indoctrination was determined by the content taught, the intention of the instructor, the methods of instruction used, the outcomes of the instruction, or by some combination of these. Adherents of the different analyses used the same general type of argument to make their case, namely, appeal to normal and aberrant usage. Unfortunately, ordinary language analysis did not lead to unanimity of opinion about where this border was located, and rival analyses of the concept were put forward (Snook 1972). The danger of restricting analysis to ordinary language (“normal English usage”) was recognized early on by Scheffler, whose preferred view of analysis emphasized

first, its greater sophistication as regards language, and the interpenetration of language and inquiry, second, its attempt to follow the modern example of the sciences in empirical spirit, in rigor, in attention to detail, in respect for alternatives, and in objectivity of method, and third, its use of techniques of symbolic logic brought to full development only in the last fifty years… It is…this union of scientific spirit and logical method applied toward the clarification of basic ideas that characterizes current analytic philosophy [and that ought to characterize analytic philosophy of education]. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 9–10])

After a period of dominance, for a number of important reasons the influence of APE went into decline. First, there were growing criticisms that the work of analytic philosophers of education had become focused upon minutiae and in the main was bereft of practical import. (It is worth noting that a 1966 article in Time , reprinted in Lucas 1969, had put forward the same criticism of mainstream philosophy.) Second, in the early 1970’s radical students in Britain accused Peters’ brand of linguistic analysis of conservatism, and of tacitly giving support to “traditional values”—they raised the issue of whose English usage was being analyzed?

Third, criticisms of language analysis in mainstream philosophy had been mounting for some time, and finally after a lag of many years were reaching the attention of philosophers of education; there even had been a surprising degree of interest on the part of the general reading public in the United Kingdom as early as 1959, when Gilbert Ryle, editor of the journal Mind , refused to commission a review of Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959)—a detailed and quite acerbic critique of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and its espousal of ordinary language analysis. (Ryle argued that Gellner’s book was too insulting, a view that drew Bertrand Russell into the fray on Gellner’s side—in the daily press, no less; Russell produced a list of insulting remarks drawn from the work of great philosophers of the past. See Mehta 1963.)

Richard Peters had been given warning that all was not well with APE at a conference in Canada in 1966; after delivering a paper on “The aims of education: A conceptual inquiry” that was based on ordinary language analysis, a philosopher in the audience (William Dray) asked Peters “ whose concepts do we analyze?” Dray went on to suggest that different people, and different groups within society, have different concepts of education. Five years before the radical students raised the same issue, Dray pointed to the possibility that what Peters had presented under the guise of a “logical analysis” was nothing but the favored usage of a certain class of persons—a class that Peters happened to identify with (see Peters 1973, where to the editor’s credit the interaction with Dray is reprinted).

Fourth, during the decade of the seventies when these various critiques of analytic philosophy were in the process of eroding its luster, a spate of translations from the Continent stimulated some philosophers of education in Britain and North America to set out in new directions, and to adopt a new style of writing and argumentation. Key works by Gadamer, Foucault and Derrida appeared in English, and these were followed in 1984 by Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition . The classic works of Heidegger and Husserl also found new admirers; and feminist philosophers of education were finding their voices—Maxine Greene published a number of pieces in the 1970s and 1980s, including The Dialectic of Freedom (1988); the influential book by Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education , appeared the same year as the work by Lyotard, followed a year later by Jane Roland Martin’s Reclaiming a Conversation . In more recent years all these trends have continued. APE was and is no longer the center of interest, although, as indicated below, it still retains its voice.

3. Areas of Contemporary Activity

As was stressed at the outset, the field of education is huge and contains within it a virtually inexhaustible number of issues that are of philosophical interest. To attempt comprehensive coverage of how philosophers of education have been working within this thicket would be a quixotic task for a large single volume and is out of the question for a solitary encyclopedia entry. Nevertheless, a valiant attempt to give an overview was made in A Companion to the Philosophy of Education (Curren 2003), which contains more than six-hundred pages divided into forty-five chapters each of which surveys a subfield of work. The following random selection of chapter topics gives a sense of the enormous scope of the field: Sex education, special education, science education, aesthetic education, theories of teaching and learning, religious education, knowledge, truth and learning, cultivating reason, the measurement of learning, multicultural education, education and the politics of identity, education and standards of living, motivation and classroom management, feminism, critical theory, postmodernism, romanticism, the purposes of universities, affirmative action in higher education, and professional education. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Education (Siegel 2009) contains a similarly broad range of articles on (among other things) the epistemic and moral aims of education, liberal education and its imminent demise, thinking and reasoning, fallibilism and fallibility, indoctrination, authenticity, the development of rationality, Socratic teaching, educating the imagination, caring and empathy in moral education, the limits of moral education, the cultivation of character, values education, curriculum and the value of knowledge, education and democracy, art and education, science education and religious toleration, constructivism and scientific methods, multicultural education, prejudice, authority and the interests of children, and on pragmatist, feminist, and postmodernist approaches to philosophy of education.

Given this enormous range, there is no non-arbitrary way to select a small number of topics for further discussion, nor can the topics that are chosen be pursued in great depth. The choice of those below has been made with an eye to highlighting contemporary work that makes solid contact with and contributes to important discussions in general philosophy and/or the academic educational and educational research communities.

The issue of what should be taught to students at all levels of education—the issue of curriculum content—obviously is a fundamental one, and it is an extraordinarily difficult one with which to grapple. In tackling it, care needs to be taken to distinguish between education and schooling—for although education can occur in schools, so can mis-education, and many other things can take place there that are educationally orthogonal (such as the provision of free or subsidized lunches and the development of social networks); and it also must be recognized that education can occur in the home, in libraries and museums, in churches and clubs, in solitary interaction with the public media, and the like.

In developing a curriculum (whether in a specific subject area, or more broadly as the whole range of offerings in an educational institution or system), a number of difficult decisions need to be made. Issues such as the proper ordering or sequencing of topics in the chosen subject, the time to be allocated to each topic, the lab work or excursions or projects that are appropriate for particular topics, can all be regarded as technical issues best resolved either by educationists who have a depth of experience with the target age group or by experts in the psychology of learning and the like. But there are deeper issues, ones concerning the validity of the justifications that have been given for including/excluding particular subjects or topics in the offerings of formal educational institutions. (Why should evolution or creation “science” be included, or excluded, as a topic within the standard high school subject Biology? Is the justification that is given for teaching Economics in some schools coherent and convincing? Do the justifications for including/excluding materials on birth control, patriotism, the Holocaust or wartime atrocities in the curriculum in some school districts stand up to critical scrutiny?)

The different justifications for particular items of curriculum content that have been put forward by philosophers and others since Plato’s pioneering efforts all draw, explicitly or implicitly, upon the positions that the respective theorists hold about at least three sets of issues.

First, what are the aims and/or functions of education (aims and functions are not necessarily the same)? Many aims have been proposed; a short list includes the production of knowledge and knowledgeable students, the fostering of curiosity and inquisitiveness, the enhancement of understanding, the enlargement of the imagination, the civilizing of students, the fostering of rationality and/or autonomy, and the development in students of care, concern and associated dispositions and attitudes (see Siegel 2007 for a longer list). The justifications offered for all such aims have been controversial, and alternative justifications of a single proposed aim can provoke philosophical controversy. Consider the aim of autonomy. Aristotle asked, what constitutes the good life and/or human flourishing, such that education should foster these (Curren 2013)? These two formulations are related, for it is arguable that our educational institutions should aim to equip individuals to pursue this good life—although this is not obvious, both because it is not clear that there is one conception of the good or flourishing life that is the good or flourishing life for everyone, and it is not clear that this is a question that should be settled in advance rather than determined by students for themselves. Thus, for example, if our view of human flourishing includes the capacity to think and act autonomously, then the case can be made that educational institutions—and their curricula—should aim to prepare, or help to prepare, autonomous individuals. A rival justification of the aim of autonomy, associated with Kant, champions the educational fostering of autonomy not on the basis of its contribution to human flourishing, but rather the obligation to treat students with respect as persons (Scheffler 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988). Still others urge the fostering of autonomy on the basis of students’ fundamental interests, in ways that draw upon both Aristotelian and Kantian conceptual resources (Brighouse 2005, 2009). It is also possible to reject the fostering of autonomy as an educational aim (Hand 2006).

Assuming that the aim can be justified, how students should be helped to become autonomous or develop a conception of the good life and pursue it is of course not immediately obvious, and much philosophical ink has been spilled on the general question of how best to determine curriculum content. One influential line of argument was developed by Paul Hirst, who argued that knowledge is essential for developing and then pursuing a conception of the good life, and because logical analysis shows, he argued, that there are seven basic forms of knowledge, the case can be made that the function of the curriculum is to introduce students to each of these forms (Hirst 1965; see Phillips 1987: ch. 11). Another, suggested by Scheffler, is that curriculum content should be selected so as “to help the learner attain maximum self-sufficiency as economically as possible.” The relevant sorts of economy include those of resources, teacher effort, student effort, and the generalizability or transfer value of content, while the self-sufficiency in question includes

self-awareness, imaginative weighing of alternative courses of action, understanding of other people’s choices and ways of life, decisiveness without rigidity, emancipation from stereotyped ways of thinking and perceiving…empathy… intuition, criticism and independent judgment. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 123–5])

Both impose important constraints on the curricular content to be taught.

Second, is it justifiable to treat the curriculum of an educational institution as a vehicle for furthering the socio-political interests and goals of a dominant group, or any particular group, including one’s own; and relatedly, is it justifiable to design the curriculum so that it serves as an instrument of control or of social engineering? In the closing decades of the twentieth century there were numerous discussions of curriculum theory, particularly from Marxist and postmodern perspectives, that offered the sobering analysis that in many educational systems, including those in Western democracies, the curriculum did indeed reflect and serve the interests of powerful cultural elites. What to do about this situation (if it is indeed the situation of contemporary educational institutions) is far from clear and is the focus of much work at the interface of philosophy of education and social/political philosophy, some of which is discussed in the next section. A closely related question is this: ought educational institutions be designed to further pre-determined social ends, or rather to enable students to competently evaluate all such ends? Scheffler argued that we should opt for the latter: we must

surrender the idea of shaping or molding the mind of the pupil. The function of education…is rather to liberate the mind, strengthen its critical powers, [and] inform it with knowledge and the capacity for independent inquiry. (Scheffler 1973 [1989: 139])

Third, should educational programs at the elementary and secondary levels be made up of a number of disparate offerings, so that individuals with different interests and abilities and affinities for learning can pursue curricula that are suitable? Or should every student pursue the same curriculum as far as each is able?—a curriculum, it should be noted, that in past cases nearly always was based on the needs or interests of those students who were academically inclined or were destined for elite social roles. Mortimer Adler and others in the late twentieth century sometimes used the aphorism “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

The thinking here can be explicated in terms of the analogy of an out-of-control virulent disease, for which there is only one type of medicine available; taking a large dose of this medicine is extremely beneficial, and the hope is that taking only a little—while less effective—is better than taking none at all. Medically, this is dubious, while the educational version—forcing students to work, until they exit the system, on topics that do not interest them and for which they have no facility or motivation—has even less merit. (For a critique of Adler and his Paideia Proposal , see Noddings 2015.) It is interesting to compare the modern “one curriculum track for all” position with Plato’s system outlined in the Republic , according to which all students—and importantly this included girls—set out on the same course of study. Over time, as they moved up the educational ladder it would become obvious that some had reached the limit imposed upon them by nature, and they would be directed off into appropriate social roles in which they would find fulfillment, for their abilities would match the demands of these roles. Those who continued on with their education would eventually become members of the ruling class of Guardians.

The publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice in 1971 was the most notable event in the history of political philosophy over the last century. The book spurred a period of ferment in political philosophy that included, among other things, new research on educationally fundamental themes. The principles of justice in educational distribution have perhaps been the dominant theme in this literature, and Rawls’s influence on its development has been pervasive.

Rawls’s theory of justice made so-called “fair equality of opportunity” one of its constitutive principles. Fair equality of opportunity entailed that the distribution of education would not put the children of those who currently occupied coveted social positions at any competitive advantage over other, equally talented and motivated children seeking the qualifications for those positions (Rawls 1971: 72–75). Its purpose was to prevent socio-economic differences from hardening into social castes that were perpetuated across generations. One obvious criticism of fair equality of opportunity is that it does not prohibit an educational distribution that lavished resources on the most talented children while offering minimal opportunities to others. So long as untalented students from wealthy families were assigned opportunities no better than those available to their untalented peers among the poor, no breach of the principle would occur. Even the most moderate egalitarians might find such a distributive regime to be intuitively repugnant.

Repugnance might be mitigated somewhat by the ways in which the overall structure of Rawls’s conception of justice protects the interests of those who fare badly in educational competition. All citizens must enjoy the same basic liberties, and equal liberty always has moral priority over equal opportunity: the former can never be compromised to advance the latter. Further, inequality in the distribution of income and wealth are permitted only to the degree that it serves the interests of the least advantaged group in society. But even with these qualifications, fair equality of opportunity is arguably less than really fair to anyone. The fact that their education should secure ends other than access to the most selective social positions—ends such as artistic appreciation, the kind of self-knowledge that humanistic study can furnish, or civic virtue—is deemed irrelevant according to Rawls’s principle. But surely it is relevant, given that a principle of educational justice must be responsive to the full range of educationally important goods.

Suppose we revise our account of the goods included in educational distribution so that aesthetic appreciation, say, and the necessary understanding and virtue for conscientious citizenship count for just as much as job-related skills. An interesting implication of doing so is that the rationale for requiring equality under any just distribution becomes decreasingly clear. That is because job-related skills are positional whereas the other educational goods are not (Hollis 1982). If you and I both aspire to a career in business management for which we are equally qualified, any increase in your job-related skills is a corresponding disadvantage to me unless I can catch up. Positional goods have a competitive structure by definition, though the ends of civic or aesthetic education do not fit that structure. If you and I aspire to be good citizens and are equal in civic understanding and virtue, an advance in your civic education is no disadvantage to me. On the contrary, it is easier to be a good citizen the better other citizens learn to be. At the very least, so far as non-positional goods figure in our conception of what counts as a good education, the moral stakes of inequality are thereby lowered.

In fact, an emerging alternative to fair equality of opportunity is a principle that stipulates some benchmark of adequacy in achievement or opportunity as the relevant standard of distribution. But it is misleading to represent this as a contrast between egalitarian and sufficientarian conceptions. Philosophically serious interpretations of adequacy derive from the ideal of equal citizenship (Satz 2007; Anderson 2007). Then again, fair equality of opportunity in Rawls’s theory is derived from a more fundamental ideal of equality among citizens. This was arguably true in A Theory of Justice but it is certainly true in his later work (Dworkin 1977: 150–183; Rawls 1993). So, both Rawls’s principle and the emerging alternative share an egalitarian foundation. The debate between adherents of equal opportunity and those misnamed as sufficientarians is certainly not over (e.g., Brighouse & Swift 2009; Jacobs 2010; Warnick 2015). Further progress will likely hinge on explicating the most compelling conception of the egalitarian foundation from which distributive principles are to be inferred. Another Rawls-inspired alternative is that a “prioritarian” distribution of achievement or opportunity might turn out to be the best principle we can come up with—i.e., one that favors the interests of the least advantaged students (Schouten 2012).

The publication of Rawls’s Political Liberalism in 1993 signaled a decisive turning point in his thinking about justice. In his earlier book, the theory of justice had been presented as if it were universally valid. But Rawls had come to think that any theory of justice presented as such was open to reasonable rejection. A more circumspect approach to justification would seek grounds for justice as fairness in an overlapping consensus between the many reasonable values and doctrines that thrive in a democratic political culture. Rawls argued that such a culture is informed by a shared ideal of free and equal citizenship that provided a new, distinctively democratic framework for justifying a conception of justice. The shift to political liberalism involved little revision on Rawls’s part to the content of the principles he favored. But the salience it gave to questions about citizenship in the fabric of liberal political theory had important educational implications. How was the ideal of free and equal citizenship to be instantiated in education in a way that accommodated the range of reasonable values and doctrines encompassed in an overlapping consensus? Political Liberalism has inspired a range of answers to that question (cf. Callan 1997; Clayton 2006; Bull 2008).

Other philosophers besides Rawls in the 1990s took up a cluster of questions about civic education, and not always from a liberal perspective. Alasdair Macintyre’s After Virtue (1984) strongly influenced the development of communitarian political theory which, as its very name might suggest, argued that the cultivation of community could preempt many of the problems with conflicting individual rights at the core of liberalism. As a full-standing alternative to liberalism, communitarianism might have little to recommend it. But it was a spur for liberal philosophers to think about how communities could be built and sustained to support the more familiar projects of liberal politics (e.g., Strike 2010). Furthermore, its arguments often converged with those advanced by feminist exponents of the ethic of care (Noddings 1984; Gilligan 1982). Noddings’ work is particularly notable because she inferred a cogent and radical agenda for the reform of schools from her conception of care (Noddings 1992).

One persistent controversy in citizenship theory has been about whether patriotism is correctly deemed a virtue, given our obligations to those who are not our fellow citizens in an increasingly interdependent world and the sordid history of xenophobia with which modern nation states are associated. The controversy is partly about what we should teach in our schools and is commonly discussed by philosophers in that context (Galston 1991; Ben-Porath 2006; Callan 2006; Miller 2007; Curren & Dorn 2018). The controversy is related to a deeper and more pervasive question about how morally or intellectually taxing the best conception of our citizenship should be. The more taxing it is, the more constraining its derivative conception of civic education will be. Contemporary political philosophers offer divergent arguments about these matters. For example, Gutmann and Thompson claim that citizens of diverse democracies need to “understand the diverse ways of life of their fellow citizens” (Gutmann & Thompson 1996: 66). The need arises from the obligation of reciprocity which they (like Rawls) believe to be integral to citizenship. Because I must seek to cooperate with others politically on terms that make sense from their moral perspective as well as my own, I must be ready to enter that perspective imaginatively so as to grasp its distinctive content. Many such perspectives prosper in liberal democracies, and so the task of reciprocal understanding is necessarily onerous. Still, our actions qua deliberative citizen must be grounded in such reciprocity if political cooperation on terms acceptable to us as (diversely) morally motivated citizens is to be possible at all. This is tantamount to an imperative to think autonomously inside the role of citizen because I cannot close-mindedly resist critical consideration of moral views alien to my own without flouting my responsibilities as a deliberative citizen.

Civic education does not exhaust the domain of moral education, even though the more robust conceptions of equal citizenship have far-reaching implications for just relations in civil society and the family. The study of moral education has traditionally taken its bearings from normative ethics rather than political philosophy, and this is largely true of work undertaken in recent decades. The major development here has been the revival of virtue ethics as an alternative to the deontological and consequentialist theories that dominated discussion for much of the twentieth century.

The defining idea of virtue ethics is that our criterion of moral right and wrong must derive from a conception of how the ideally virtuous agent would distinguish between the two. Virtue ethics is thus an alternative to both consequentialism and deontology which locate the relevant criterion in producing good consequences or meeting the requirements of moral duty respectively. The debate about the comparative merits of these theories is not resolved, but from an educational perspective that may be less important than it has sometimes seemed to antagonists in the debate. To be sure, adjudicating between rival theories in normative ethics might shed light on how best to construe the process of moral education, and philosophical reflection on the process might help us to adjudicate between the theories. There has been extensive work on habituation and virtue, largely inspired by Aristotle (Burnyeat 1980; Peters 1981). But whether this does anything to establish the superiority of virtue ethics over its competitors is far from obvious. Other aspects of moral education—in particular, the paired processes of role-modelling and identification—deserve much more scrutiny than they have received (Audi 2017; Kristjánsson 2015, 2017).

Related to the issues concerning the aims and functions of education and schooling rehearsed above are those involving the specifically epistemic aims of education and attendant issues treated by social and virtue epistemologists. (The papers collected in Kotzee 2013 and Baehr 2016 highlight the current and growing interactions among social epistemologists, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of education.)

There is, first, a lively debate concerning putative epistemic aims. Alvin Goldman argues that truth (or knowledge understood in the “weak” sense of true belief) is the fundamental epistemic aim of education (Goldman 1999). Others, including the majority of historically significant philosophers of education, hold that critical thinking or rationality and rational belief (or knowledge in the “strong” sense that includes justification) is the basic epistemic educational aim (Bailin & Siegel 2003; Scheffler 1965, 1973 [1989]; Siegel 1988, 1997, 2005, 2017). Catherine Z. Elgin (1999a,b) and Duncan Pritchard (2013, 2016; Carter & Pritchard 2017) have independently urged that understanding is the basic aim. Pritchard’s view combines understanding with intellectual virtue ; Jason Baehr (2011) systematically defends the fostering of the intellectual virtues as the fundamental epistemic aim of education. This cluster of views continues to engender ongoing discussion and debate. (Its complex literature is collected in Carter and Kotzee 2015, summarized in Siegel 2018, and helpfully analyzed in Watson 2016.)

A further controversy concerns the places of testimony and trust in the classroom: In what circumstances if any ought students to trust their teachers’ pronouncements, and why? Here the epistemology of education is informed by social epistemology, specifically the epistemology of testimony; the familiar reductionism/anti-reductionism controversy there is applicable to students and teachers. Anti-reductionists, who regard testimony as a basic source of justification, may with equanimity approve of students’ taking their teachers’ word at face value and believing what they say; reductionists may balk. Does teacher testimony itself constitute good reason for student belief?

The correct answer here seems clearly enough to be “it depends”. For very young children who have yet to acquire or develop the ability to subject teacher declarations to critical scrutiny, there seems to be little alternative to accepting what their teachers tell them. For older and more cognitively sophisticated students there seem to be more options: they can assess them for plausibility, compare them with other opinions, assess the teachers’ proffered reasons, subject them to independent evaluation, etc. Regarding “the teacher says that p ” as itself a good reason to believe it appears moreover to contravene the widely shared conviction that an important educational aim is helping students to become able to evaluate candidate beliefs for themselves and believe accordingly. That said, all sides agree that sometimes believers, including students, have good reasons simply to trust what others tell them. There is thus more work to do here by both social epistemologists and philosophers of education (for further discussion see Goldberg 2013; Siegel 2005, 2018).

A further cluster of questions, of long-standing interest to philosophers of education, concerns indoctrination : How if at all does it differ from legitimate teaching? Is it inevitable, and if so is it not always necessarily bad? First, what is it? As we saw earlier, extant analyses focus on the aims or intentions of the indoctrinator, the methods employed, or the content transmitted. If the indoctrination is successful, all have the result that students/victims either don’t, won’t, or can’t subject the indoctrinated material to proper epistemic evaluation. In this way it produces both belief that is evidentially unsupported or contravened and uncritical dispositions to believe. It might seem obvious that indoctrination, so understood, is educationally undesirable. But it equally seems that very young children, at least, have no alternative but to believe sans evidence; they have yet to acquire the dispositions to seek and evaluate evidence, or the abilities to recognize evidence or evaluate it. Thus we seem driven to the views that indoctrination is both unavoidable and yet bad and to be avoided. It is not obvious how this conundrum is best handled. One option is to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable indoctrination. Another is to distinguish between indoctrination (which is always bad) and non-indoctrinating belief inculcation, the latter being such that students are taught some things without reasons (the alphabet, the numbers, how to read and count, etc.), but in such a way that critical evaluation of all such material (and everything else) is prized and fostered (Siegel 1988: ch. 5). In the end the distinctions required by the two options might be extensionally equivalent (Siegel 2018).

Education, it is generally granted, fosters belief : in the typical propositional case, Smith teaches Jones that p , and if all goes well Jones learns it and comes to believe it. Education also has the task of fostering open-mindedness and an appreciation of our fallibility : All the theorists mentioned thus far, especially those in the critical thinking and intellectual virtue camps, urge their importance. But these two might seem at odds. If Jones (fully) believes that p , can she also be open-minded about it? Can she believe, for example, that earthquakes are caused by the movements of tectonic plates, while also believing that perhaps they aren’t? This cluster of italicized notions requires careful handling; it is helpfully discussed by Jonathan Adler (2002, 2003), who recommends regarding the latter two as meta-attitudes concerning one’s first-order beliefs rather than lessened degrees of belief or commitments to those beliefs.

Other traditional epistemological worries that impinge upon the epistemology of education concern (a) absolutism , pluralism and relativism with respect to knowledge, truth and justification as these relate to what is taught, (b) the character and status of group epistemologies and the prospects for understanding such epistemic goods “universalistically” in the face of “particularist” challenges, (c) the relation between “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-that” and their respective places in the curriculum, (d) concerns raised by multiculturalism and the inclusion/exclusion of marginalized perspectives in curriculum content and the classroom, and (e) further issues concerning teaching and learning. (There is more here than can be briefly summarized; for more references and systematic treatment cf. Bailin & Siegel 2003; Carter & Kotzee 2015; Cleverley & Phillips 1986; Robertson 2009; Siegel 2004, 2017; and Watson 2016.)

The educational research enterprise has been criticized for a century or more by politicians, policymakers, administrators, curriculum developers, teachers, philosophers of education, and by researchers themselves—but the criticisms have been contradictory. Charges of being “too ivory tower and theory-oriented” are found alongside “too focused on practice and too atheoretical”; but in light of the views of John Dewey and William James that the function of theory is to guide intelligent practice and problem-solving, it is becoming more fashionable to hold that the “theory v. practice” dichotomy is a false one. (For an illuminating account of the historical development of educational research and its tribulations, see Lagemann 2000.)

A similar trend can be discerned with respect to the long warfare between two rival groups of research methods—on one hand quantitative/statistical approaches to research, and on the other hand the qualitative/ethnographic family. (The choice of labels here is not entirely risk-free, for they have been contested; furthermore the first approach is quite often associated with “experimental” studies, and the latter with “case studies”, but this is an over-simplification.) For several decades these two rival methodological camps were treated by researchers and a few philosophers of education as being rival paradigms (Kuhn’s ideas, albeit in a very loose form, have been influential in the field of educational research), and the dispute between them was commonly referred to as “the paradigm wars”. In essence the issue at stake was epistemological: members of the quantitative/experimental camp believed that only their methods could lead to well-warranted knowledge claims, especially about the causal factors at play in educational phenomena, and on the whole they regarded qualitative methods as lacking in rigor; on the other hand the adherents of qualitative/ethnographic approaches held that the other camp was too “positivistic” and was operating with an inadequate view of causation in human affairs—one that ignored the role of motives and reasons, possession of relevant background knowledge, awareness of cultural norms, and the like. Few if any commentators in the “paradigm wars” suggested that there was anything prohibiting the use of both approaches in the one research program—provided that if both were used, they were used only sequentially or in parallel, for they were underwritten by different epistemologies and hence could not be blended together. But recently the trend has been towards rapprochement, towards the view that the two methodological families are, in fact, compatible and are not at all like paradigms in the Kuhnian sense(s) of the term; the melding of the two approaches is often called “mixed methods research”, and it is growing in popularity. (For more detailed discussion of these “wars” see Howe 2003 and Phillips 2009.)

The most lively contemporary debates about education research, however, were set in motion around the turn of the millennium when the US Federal Government moved in the direction of funding only rigorously scientific educational research—the kind that could establish causal factors which could then guide the development of practically effective policies. (It was held that such a causal knowledge base was available for medical decision-making.) The definition of “rigorously scientific”, however, was decided by politicians and not by the research community, and it was given in terms of the use of a specific research method—the net effect being that the only research projects to receive Federal funding were those that carried out randomized controlled experiments or field trials (RFTs). It has become common over the last decade to refer to the RFT as the “gold standard” methodology.

The National Research Council (NRC)—an arm of the US National Academies of Science—issued a report, influenced by postpostivistic philosophy of science (NRC 2002), that argued that this criterion was far too narrow. Numerous essays have appeared subsequently that point out how the “gold standard” account of scientific rigor distorts the history of science, how the complex nature of the relation between evidence and policy-making has been distorted and made to appear overly simple (for instance the role of value-judgments in linking empirical findings to policy directives is often overlooked), and qualitative researchers have insisted upon the scientific nature of their work. Nevertheless, and possibly because it tried to be balanced and supported the use of RFTs in some research contexts, the NRC report has been the subject of symposia in four journals, where it has been supported by a few and attacked from a variety of philosophical fronts: Its authors were positivists, they erroneously believed that educational inquiry could be value neutral and that it could ignore the ways in which the exercise of power constrains the research process, they misunderstood the nature of educational phenomena, and so on. This cluster of issues continues to be debated by educational researchers and by philosophers of education and of science, and often involves basic topics in philosophy of science: the constitution of warranting evidence, the nature of theories and of confirmation and explanation, etc. Nancy Cartwright’s important recent work on causation, evidence, and evidence-based policy adds layers of both philosophical sophistication and real world practical analysis to the central issues just discussed (Cartwright & Hardie 2012, Cartwright 2013; cf. Kvernbekk 2015 for an overview of the controversies regarding evidence in the education and philosophy of education literatures).

As stressed earlier, it is impossible to do justice to the whole field of philosophy of education in a single encyclopedia entry. Different countries around the world have their own intellectual traditions and their own ways of institutionalizing philosophy of education in the academic universe, and no discussion of any of this appears in the present essay. But even in the Anglo-American world there is such a diversity of approaches that any author attempting to produce a synoptic account will quickly run into the borders of his or her competence. Clearly this has happened in the present case.

Fortunately, in the last thirty years or so resources have become available that significantly alleviate these problems. There has been a flood of encyclopedia entries, both on the field as a whole and also on many specific topics not well-covered in the present essay (see, as a sample, Burbules 1994; Chambliss 1996b; Curren 1998, 2018; Phillips 1985, 2010; Siegel 2007; Smeyers 1994), two “Encyclopedias” (Chambliss 1996a; Phillips 2014), a “Guide” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish 2003), a “Companion” (Curren 2003), two “Handbooks” (Siegel 2009; Bailey, Barrow, Carr, & McCarthy 2010), a comprehensive anthology (Curren 2007), a dictionary of key concepts in the field (Winch & Gingell 1999), and a good textbook or two (Carr 2003; Noddings 2015). In addition there are numerous volumes both of reprinted selections and of specially commissioned essays on specific topics, some of which were given short shrift here (for another sampling see A. Rorty 1998, Stone 1994), and several international journals, including Theory and Research in Education , Journal of Philosophy of Education , Educational Theory , Studies in Philosophy and Education , and Educational Philosophy and Theory . Thus there is more than enough material available to keep the interested reader busy.

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The authors and editors would like to thank Randall Curren for sending a number of constructive suggestions for the Summer 2018 update of this entry.

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• Article Summary
• 1 Socrates and the sophists
• 2 Plato and Aristotle
• 3 Hellenistic and Roman education
• 4 Augustine and Aquinas
• 5 The Renaissance and Reformation
• 6 Descartes and Locke
• 7 Rousseau and Kant
• 8 The nineteenth century
• 9 John Dewey
• Bibliography

Education, history of philosophy of

• Curren, Randall R.
• content locked version 2
• content unlocked version 1

1. Socrates and the sophists

Educational philosophy began in the Greek classical period with the examination of the educational claims of the sophists undertaken by Socrates. The sophists brought higher education to the democratized Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries bc , offering those who aspired to political leadership a training in political aretē (the goodness, excellence or virtue required for success in pursuing appropriate ends) or phronēsis (sound judgment or practical wisdom) (see Aretē ; Sophists ). This form of education suggested that most citizens lacked the virtue and judgment required for a life in public affairs, and one can detect a concession to the political dangerousness of this in the claims of Protagoras that cities and their citizens do indeed teach virtue to the young, but that his own teaching could refine and develop it by degrees. In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates exposes the tensions in this view by distinguishing between the habitual virtue of good or obedient citizens, and true virtue which involves intellectual insight and sound judgment (that is, phronēsis ), noting that a skill which merely refines and enlarges the former cannot yield the latter.

More generally, the Socratic response to the sophists was above all cautionary. As we encounter Socrates in the Protagoras and other early dialogues of Plato, he dedicated himself to showing through his method of questioning ( elenchus ) that those who claimed to be teachers of aretē lacked the expert knowledge of it which its teaching would require. The possession of such knowledge would allow one to defend and explain the truths one believes through a reasoned account ( aitias logismos ), and Socrates denied that he was himself a teacher, apparently on the grounds that he was unable to give such an account of his own beliefs. He advocated the individual care of one’s own soul, and embraced an ethic of justice, wisdom and self-restraint, in opposition to the competitive ethic of the warrior heroes portrayed by Homer and embraced by Greek popular morality. How far he thought his own elenctic method would carry one in this care of the soul, or in the search for the best way to live, is unclear (see Socrates ).

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By: History.com Editors

Updated: June 13, 2023 | Original: November 9, 2009

Viewed by many as the founding figure of Western philosophy, Socrates (469-399 B.C.) is at once the most exemplary and the strangest of the Greek philosophers. He grew up during the golden age of Pericles’ Athens, served with distinction as a soldier, but became best known as a questioner of everything and everyone. His style of teaching—immortalized as the Socratic method—involved not conveying knowledge, but rather asking question after clarifying question until his students arrived at their own understanding. 

Socrates wrote nothing himself, so all that is known about him is filtered through the writings of a few contemporaries and followers, most notably his student Plato. Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and sentenced to death. Choosing not to flee, he spent his final days in the company of his friends before drinking the executioner’s cup of poisonous hemlock.

Socrates: Early Years

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 talented mistress of the great Athenian leader Pericles .

Did you know? Although he never outright rejected the standard Athenian view of religion, Socrates' beliefs were nonconformist. He often referred to God rather than the gods, and reported being guided by an inner divine voice .

His family apparently had the moderate wealth required to launch Socrates’ career as a hoplite (foot soldier). As an infantryman, Socrates showed great physical endurance and courage, rescuing the future Athenian leader Alcibiades during the siege of Potidaea in 432 B.C. 

Through the 420s, Socrates was deployed for several battles in the Peloponnesian War , but also spent enough time in Athens to become known and beloved by the city’s youth. In 423 he was introduced to the broader public as a caricature in Aristophanes’ play “Clouds,” which depicted him as an unkempt buffoon whose philosophy amounted to teaching rhetorical tricks for getting out of debt.

Philosophy of Socrates

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 rejected the sort of fame and power that Athenians were expected to strive for. His lifestyle—and eventually his death—embodied his spirit of questioning every assumption about virtue, wisdom and the good life.

Two of his younger students, the historian Xenophon and the philosopher Plato, recorded the most significant accounts of Socrates’ life and philosophy. For both, the Socrates that appears bears the mark of the writer. Thus, Xenophon’s Socrates is more straightforward, willing to offer advice rather than simply asking more questions. In Plato’s later works, Socrates speaks with what seem to be largely Plato’s ideas. 

In the earliest of Plato’s “Dialogues”—considered by historians to be the most accurate portrayal—Socrates rarely reveals any opinions of his own as he brilliantly helps his interlocutors dissect their thoughts and motives in Socratic dialogue, a form of literature in which two or more characters (in this case, one of them Socrates) discuss moral and philosophical issues.

One of the greatest paradoxes that Socrates helped his students explore was whether weakness of will—doing wrong when you genuinely knew what was right—ever truly existed. He seemed to think otherwise: people only did wrong when at the moment the perceived benefits seemed to outweigh the costs. Thus the development of personal ethics is a matter of mastering what he called “the art of measurement,” correcting the distortions that skew one’s analyses of benefit and cost.

Socrates was also deeply interested in understanding the limits of human knowledge. When he was told that the Oracle at Delphi had declared that he was the wisest man in Athens, Socrates balked until he realized that, although he knew nothing, he was (unlike his fellow citizens) keenly aware of his own ignorance.

Trial and Death of Socrates

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 democracy known as demokratia. 

Socrates became the lone opponent of an illegal proposal to try a group of Athens’ top generals for failing to recover their dead from a battle against Sparta (the generals were executed once Socrates’ assembly service ended). Three years later, when a tyrannical Athenian government ordered Socrates to participate in the arrest and execution of Leon of Salamis, he refused—an act of civil disobedience that Martin Luther King Jr. would cite in his “ Letter from a Birmingham Jail .”

The tyrants were forced from power before they could punish Socrates, but in 399 he was indicted for failing to honor the Athenian gods and for corrupting the young. Although some historians suggest that there may have been political machinations behind the trial, he was condemned on the basis of his thought and teaching. In his “The Apology of Socrates,” Plato recounts him mounting a spirited defense of his virtue before the jury but calmly accepting their verdict. It was in court that Socrates allegedly uttered the now-famous phrase, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

His execution was delayed for 30 days due to a religious festival, during which the philosopher’s distraught friends tried unsuccessfully to convince him to escape from Athens. On his last day, Plato says, he “appeared both happy in manner and words as he died nobly and without fear.” He drank the cup of brewed hemlock his executioner handed him, walked around until his legs grew numb and then lay down, surrounded by his friends, and waited for the poison to reach his heart.

The Socratic Legacy

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”). 

Since all that is known of his philosophy is based on the writing of others, the Socratic problem, or Socratic question–reconstructing the philosopher’s beliefs in full and exploring any contradictions in second-hand accounts of them–remains an open question facing scholars today.

Socrates and his followers expanded the purpose of philosophy from trying to understand the outside world to trying to tease apart one’s inner values. His passion for definitions and hair-splitting questions inspired the development of formal logic and systematic ethics from the time of Aristotle through the Renaissance and into the modern era. 

Moreover, Socrates’ life became an exemplar of the difficulty and the importance of living (and if necessary dying) according to one’s well-examined beliefs. In his 1791 autobiography Benjamin Franklin reduced this notion to a single line: “Humility: Imitate Jesus and Socrates.”

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World History Edu

• Greek Philosophers

Socrates: His Beliefs and Philosophy

by World History Edu · May 21, 2019

Socrates was one of the greatest Greek philosophers by a wide margin. He was born in 469 BCE at a place called Deme Alpoece, Athens. For the entirety of his life, this classical Greek philosopher devoted himself to finding the most ideal way of living a moral life. His extensive works in ethics and epistemology are what formed the pillars of Western philosophy. Kind courtesy of the efforts and sheer brilliance of his most famous student, Plato , Socrates’s ideas and philosophy continue to hold significant sway in our world, even after thousands of years. In 399 BCE, Socrates passed away after he was sentenced to death by the Athenians. He was charged with ‘corrupting’ the youth and heresy.

Read the biography below to learn more about Socrates, as well as his beliefs and philosophy.

Early Beginnings

The lack of proper chronicles and autobiography makes it difficult for historians to accurately give details about Socrates’ childhood. What is however known is that, Socrates came from a relatively poor family. His father was a stonemason that went by the name Sophroniscus. Socrates’ mother was Phaenarete- a diligent and hardworking midwife. As a result of his family’s financial hardships, Socrates could not obtain any formal education. He ended up assisting his father at his workshop.

When Socrates attained the age of maturity, it is likely that he served in the military during the Peloponnesian War , which festered between Athens and Sparta. Other specific accounts of the history state that Socrates served in an armored infantry ( hoplite ) during military campaigns in Potidaea, Delium, and Amphipolis. Back then, it was compulsory for all able-bodied men to fight for Athens in times of wars.  It is believed that he dispatched his duties bravely and gallantly.

Socrates certainly had a superior intellect. However, he was not so good looking. His student, Plato, portrayed him as anything but physically handsome.

It must be noted that the history and story surrounding Socrates is not so much straightforward. There have been some levels of contradictions in Plato’s dialogues and among the accounts of Xenophon and Aristotle.

How the world came to know about Socrates

Socrates was a very peculiar Greek philosopher in the sense that he never wrote down any thoughts of his. He simply spoke out his mind and engaged in intellectual discussions with his followers. Socrates would roam the streets of ancient Athens trying to trigger the reasoning capacity of people from all walks of life. For example, he would question them; debate with Athenians about why they held certain beliefs; and ask how those beliefs of theirs shape their lives. Those were his favored methods of expressing and refining his ideas.

The task of writing what this wonderful philosopher thought and spoke about fell to his students and followers. Historians believe that had it not been for the recordings (writings) made by philosophers like Plato (428-348 BCE) , Xenophon (c. 431 – c. 354 BCE) and Aristophanes (c. 460- c. 380 BCE), the world would not have known anything about Socrates. These great philosophers chronicled the life of Socrates as well as his ideas.

For instance, Plato wrote extensive dialogues (Plato’s Dialogues) where the main character in the conversation was his tutor Socrates. With such innovative techniques of writing, Plato was able to use about 36 different dialogues to convey Socratic thoughts and philosophies to the public. Most notable of such dialogues are the Crito, the Apology, Symposium and the Phaedo (Platonic Socrates text).

Socrates’ best-known ideas and thoughts

Exactly when Socrates began thinking deeply about life and morality is unknown. Accounts and dialogues from his students mostly transport us to a time when Socrates was a relatively old man.

His thoughts were usually geared towards the pursuit of ethics and value-laden life. He searched for a set of universal truths that would help Athenian society live a morally upright life. According to him, the physical world we live in was just a mirror image of things that are false. Real truth, to him, is found in justice and the good. Material things like wealth, financial gains and power have not and cannot give us true happiness. Socrates believed that a society that ignored the quest of philosophical constructs and ideas were doomed to be sad and miserable.

All of the above ideas flew right across the faces of the powerful and elite in ancient Athens. Many of those elites considered Socrates’ sayings a threat to the stability of Greece. To say that Socrates’ ideas were radical at that time would be an understatement.

Socrates and the concept of justice

His discussions about virtues and justice quickly caught on with the youths of ancient Athens. Socrates gave them hope; he inspired in them a new way of thinking and viewing the world. Some authors have claimed that Socrates unshackled the chains that hang tight around the young men at that time. He admonished them for taking things on surface-level without questioning people in power or experts in various professions. He called on every Athenian to become a philosopher first and foremost. His discussions were full of questions instead of answers. These questions went a long way in liberating their thought process and giving them suggestive ideas on how best to live a moral life.

Also, Socrates believed that the best form of philosophy is one that probes deep and questions the things in this world. In order to do this, he advocated that one must come with an open mind so as to allow answers flow into the mind. He had this famous saying that read as: “I know that I know nothing”.

Schools of thoughts that existed before Socrates

Prior to Socrates coming onto the scene, the dominant thought or philosophical reasoning is referred to as pre-Socratic. That is how much of an influence Socrates had on Ancient Greek philosophy.

The pre-Socratic philosophers engaged in a different approach that desisted from using mythological analysis of the environment. Examples of such schools were the Milesians, Xenophanes, Pythagorians, Eleatics, Heraclitus, and the Sophists. Their focus of the study was mainly on cosmology, mathematics, and ontology. In sophism, for example, philosophers believed that there are relative ways of explaining the constants in the environment. According to them, the physis (nature) remains unchanged but the nomos (law) is what varies. One of the biggest advocate of sophism was Protagoras.

Socrates, along with Plato, opined that the sophists were radical relativists (‘perspectivists’) that used unjust subjectivity in philosophy.

Socrates’ Approach to Philosophy ( The Socratic Method )

Socratic philosophy sharply differs from its predecessors because it searches for a universal truth. Unlike the sophists, Socrates believed that the law (nomos) never changes. The ideals (FORMS) of justice, beauty, bravery, and honesty remain unchanged. Hence, those truths should be the pursuit of every one of us in order to lead a moral life.

The process of pursuing those truths is what is termed as the Socratic Method. Socrates used a method of self-analysis to explore subjects of the physical world. At the heart of this introspection was engaging first with oneself and then with others. Often times, it started off as a simple question and then it glided into more and more questions. Socrates was less interested in coming up with the answers. On the other hand, the asking questions were what gave him fulfillment and joy.

The reason why there are contradictions in Socrates’ biography

Contradictions in the accounts of what Socrates believed in stem from the writings in Plato’s dialogue. The divergent stories about Socrates lend no help in zooming down on Socrates actual views.

Furthermore, some historians and philosophers have maintained that Plato planted Socrates’ character in his dialogues to accentuate his views about life. They go as far as saying that the ideas purported to be Socrates’ may have not been the views of Socrates himself.

Another reason area of contention is whether or not Socrates accepted payment in exchange for his tutoring. Plato’s Apology and Symposium both claim that Socrates did not accept money or any other payment in kind for his tutoring works. As a result of this, Socrates lived in abject poverty for a great all his life.

However, Aristophanes’ the Clouds begged to differ. Aristophanes wrote that Socrates took payments in exchange for tutoring at a Sophist school. Another student of Plato, Xenophon, expressed similar remarks.

Regardless of such minuscule details, it is evident that Socrates was certainly a real person- not the figment of Plato’s imagination done to propagate his ideas. This is because there are lots of key points about Socrates that have been corroborated by philosophers such as Aristotle and Xenophon. For example, Aristotle made mention of the fact that Socrates utterly believed in virtue being knowledge. Similarly, Xenophon (in his Symposium ) stated that Socrates was obsessed with discussing philosophy.

How Socrates died

Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher, often considered one of the founders of Western philosophy, who lived in Athens during the 5th century BC. Image: A painting by French painter Jacques-Louis David (1787) on the Death of Socrates

Socrates’ death has been described as a very tragic one. It has been retold for a countless number of times over thousands of years. Socrates’ demise happened in a gradual manner. It all started when the political elites of Athenian society got wary of the increased influence Socrates chalked up with the youth.

The philosopher simply became a thorn in the flesh of the ruling elites. Coupled with this, Athens was in a recovery process after the lost to Sparta during the Peloponnesian War. The defeat catapulted a section of elites to power. They were called the Thirty Tyrants . One of Socrates’ students, Critias, was even part of this new ruling class.

The reign of the Thirty Tyrants did not last for long. There was a people revolution in Athens, the tyrants got toppled, and a democratic government was installed.

Shortly after this, the new government started clamping down on all those that were affiliated to the Thirty Tyrants. Socrates was among the people that were taken into custody. The Athenians considered Socrates as someone against democracy. Additionally, there were some of his followers and students that sympathized with the Thirty Tyrant’s cause.

Socrates was put on trial for treason. The exact charges that were levied against him were:

• the corruption of the youth of Athens
• heresy and disregard of the Greek gods and goddesses of Athens

Typical of Socrates, he was not perturbed by those charges. He believed that reasoning and logical discussions would be able to convince the jury that he was innocent of those charges. Plato’s dialogues portrayed him as thoughtfully and very articulate during the trial.

Unfortunately, the jury wanted to have nothing to do with any Socratic Method of analyzing the charges. Who could blame them? They were deeply immersed in a mythological approach of dealing with the physical world.

Socrates lost the trial and was sentenced to death. In 399 BCE, the execution was carried out by means of a drink laced with the poisonous hemlock ( Conium maculatum ). This plant was the go-to-plant for the execution of prisoners in ancient Greece. While in prison, Socrates had the opportunity to break free, however, he chose not to do so.

READ MORE:  How and Why Ancient Greece Fell

Reasons why Socrates chose not to break free from prison

In Plato’s Phaedo , Plato stated that his dear friend and tutor could certainly have avoided this sad fate of his by escaping. One of Socrates’ friends, Crito, made arrangements for Socrates to prison break to freedom. Crito was wealthy and had connections in high places that he could easily bribe in order to secure the escape of Socrates. However, Socrates opted not to do so.

The reasons why he stayed in prison can be inferred from the Phaedo and the Crito as follows:

First and foremost, Socrates was not the type of person to shy away from a fight. And certainly, he wasn’t going to do so even when death stared at him right in the face. He believed that a virtuous soul is one that is brave enough to stand in the face of persecution. In the Phaedo, Socrates believed that his life-long philosophical training had adequately prepared him when for death.

Socrates’ quote about old age

Secondly, Socrates felt that had he escaped, the inquisitive nature of his mind was bound to bring him at odds with another authority elsewhere. Perhaps Socrates felt that his time was up.

The final reason has to do with Socrates’ high sense of “social contract” with the state. He reasoned that his trial and punishment were not something to be frowned upon. Obviously, he did not like the punishment; however, he felt obligated to be subjected to the city’s laws and judicial processes. Besides, had he escaped, those that facilitated in his escape were bound to receive a similar fate as his. Therefore, escaping was far too a heavy price to pay.

Socrates’s last words to his dear friend, Crito

Legacy of Socrates

Socrates’ contribution to philosophy can fully be seen in the accounts of the people that he influenced. The writings of Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle paint some very ground-breaking reasoning by Socrates. All in all, those teachings served as the foundations for Classical Greek Philosophy. That, in turn, went on to influence the world for the next 2000 or so years.

He was the first moral philosopher of his time. He was a philosopher who used reasoning, and not myths or superstition, to interpret the world. Everything from religion, politics, cosmology, poetry, and mathematics owe the majority of their ideas to Socratic philosophy and methodology.

Interesting Facts about Socrates

This piece on Socrates has been summarized with the following interesting facts about Socrates:

• Contrary to what the likes of Xenophon and Aristotle said, Plato claimed that Socrates did not accept payments for his services
• Socrates married Xanthippe. This marriage produced three children by the names Menexenus, Sophroniscus, and Lamprocles.
• He is credited to have said: “the unexamined life is not worth living”. In this saying Socrates equating self-knowledge and analysis to true happiness.
• He was not solely in favor of democratic principles. Just like his student, Plato, he called for wise and philosophical leaders.
• Socrates spoke to anyone who was interested in having an intellectual conversation. Rather than display to the folks how much he knew, he asked questions (the Socratic Method).
• Socrates mounted a fierce defense during his trial. He shocked the jury by stating that the state should rather pay him for his life-long dedication to Athens.
• The 280 aye votes from the jury members (as against 221 nays) were enough to sentence Socrates to death.
• Chose to remain in prison and see through his death sentence
• Even in his death bed, Socrates appeared very calm and composed. There was no hesitation whatsoever on his part.
• Socrates was a very short and slightly ugly man (in ancient Greek standards). He also had protruding eyes and nose.
• He was not so much enthused about theology and mythical ideas. Therefore, Socrates was not your typical ancient Greek religious guy.
• Right until his death, Socrates maintained that the most virtuous way to respond to injustice was not more injustice. This idea is what forms the basis of the social contract theory that we have today.

Socrates (469-399 BCE)

In the past 24 or so centuries, Socrates’ ideas and sphere of influence have stretched all over the world. As the father of Classical Greek philosophy, he has been portrayed in innumerable art and scientific works. This Athenian-born philosopher is undeniably one of the greatest person and thinker in all of human history.

Frequently Asked Questions about Socrates

These FAQs provide a basic introduction to Socrates, but his life, philosophy, and influence are subjects of deep study and contemplation in academia and beyond.

What is Socrates best known for?

He is best known for his Socratic method of questioning, emphasizing critical thinking and the pursuit of virtue. He did not write any texts; our knowledge of him comes primarily from the writings of his students, notably Plato and Xenophon.

What is the Socratic method?

The Socratic method is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals to stimulate critical thinking and illuminate ideas. It involves asking a series of questions to draw out underlying beliefs and assumptions.

Why was Socrates sentenced to death?

In 399 BCE, Socrates was put on trial and sentenced to death for “corrupting the youth” and “impiety” (not recognizing the gods recognized by the state). Some believe his questioning of traditional beliefs and values threatened the status quo.

How did Socrates die?

He was sentenced to die by consuming a drink containing poison hemlock. He met his end calmly, surrounded by his students.

What are the main sources of information about Socrates?

Most of what we know about Socrates comes from the works of his student Plato, especially the “Dialogues”, and from the writings of Xenophon. He’s also mentioned in the works of the playwright Aristophanes.

Did Socrates have any specific teachings?

Unlike other philosophers, Socrates claimed not to have his own teachings. Instead, he saw himself as a “midwife of ideas,” helping others bring forth their own understanding.

What did Socrates believe about knowledge and wisdom?

One of his most famous sayings is, “I know that I know nothing.” He believed that recognizing one’s own ignorance was the first step to wisdom.

How did Socrates view ethics and virtue?

Socrates believed that virtue was the most valuable of all possessions and that the purpose of life was the pursuit of virtue and ethical knowledge.

How has Socrates influenced modern philosophy and thought?

Socrates’ emphasis on critical questioning and ethical living laid the foundations for Western philosophical thought. His influence is seen in the works of subsequent philosophers, methods of pedagogy, and even in legal questioning techniques.

Tags: Ancient Greek Philosophers Classical Greek Philosophy Plato Plato's Dialogues Socrates Socratic method

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Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher considered to be the main source of Western thought. He was condemned to death for his Socratic method of questioning.

Who Was Socrates?

Socrates was a scholar, teacher and philosopher born in ancient Greece . His Socratic method laid the groundwork for Western systems of logic and philosophy.

When the political climate of Greece turned against him, Socrates was sentenced to death by hemlock poisoning in 399 B.C. He accepted this judgment rather than fleeing into exile.

Early Years

Born circa 470 B.C. in Athens, Greece, Socrates's life is chronicled through only a few sources: the dialogues of Plato and Xenophon and the plays of Aristophanes.

Because these writings had other purposes than reporting his life, it is likely none present a completely accurate picture. However, collectively, they provide a unique and vivid portrayal of Socrates's philosophy and personality.

Socrates was the son of Sophroniscus, an Athenian stonemason and sculptor, and Phaenarete, a midwife. Because he wasn't from a noble family, he probably received a basic Greek education and learned his father's craft at a young age. It's believed Socrates worked as mason for many years before he devoted his life to philosophy.

Contemporaries differ in their account of how Socrates supported himself as a philosopher. Both Xenophon and Aristophanes state Socrates received payment for teaching, while Plato writes Socrates explicitly denied accepting payment, citing his poverty as proof.

Socrates married Xanthippe, a younger woman, who bore him three sons: Lamprocles, Sophroniscus and Menexenus. There is little known about her except for Xenophon's characterization of Xanthippe as "undesirable."

He writes she was not happy with Socrates's second profession and complained that he wasn’t supporting family as a philosopher. By his own words, Socrates had little to do with his sons' upbringing and expressed far more interest in the intellectual development of Athens' other young boys.

Life in Athens

Athenian law required all able-bodied males serve as citizen soldiers, on call for duty from ages 18 until 60. According to Plato, Socrates served in the armored infantry — known as the hoplite — with shield, long spear and face mask.

He participated in three military campaigns during the Peloponnesian War , at Delium, Amphipolis and Potidaea, where he saved the life of Alcibiades, a popular Athenian general.

Socrates was known for his fortitude in battle and his fearlessness, a trait that stayed with him throughout his life. After his trial, he compared his refusal to retreat from his legal troubles to a soldier's refusal to retreat from battle when threatened with death.

Plato's Symposium provides the best details of Socrates' physical appearance. He was not the ideal of Athenian masculinity. Short and stocky, with a snub nose and bulging eyes, Socrates always seemed to appear to be staring.

However, Plato pointed out that in the eyes of his students, Socrates possessed a different kind of attractiveness, not based on a physical ideal but on his brilliant debates and penetrating thought.

Socrates always emphasized the importance of the mind over the relative unimportance of the human body. This credo inspired Plato’s philosophy of dividing reality into two separate realms, the world of the senses and the world of ideas, declaring that the latter was the only important one.

Socrates believed that philosophy should achieve practical results for the greater well-being of society. He attempted to establish an ethical system based on human reason rather than theological doctrine.

Socrates pointed out that human choice was motivated by the desire for happiness. Ultimate wisdom comes from knowing oneself. The more a person knows, the greater his or her ability to reason and make choices that will bring true happiness.

Socrates believed that this translated into politics with the best form of government being neither a tyranny nor a democracy. Instead, government worked best when ruled by individuals who had the greatest ability, knowledge and virtue, and possessed a complete understanding of themselves.

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Socratic Method

For Socrates, Athens was a classroom and he went about asking questions of the elite and common man alike, seeking to arrive at political and ethical truths. Socrates didn’t lecture about what he knew. In fact, he claimed to be ignorant because he had no ideas, but wise because he recognized his own ignorance.

He asked questions of his fellow Athenians in a dialectic method — the Socratic Method — which compelled the audience to think through a problem to a logical conclusion. Sometimes the answer seemed so obvious, it made Socrates' opponents look foolish. For this, his Socratic Method was admired by some and vilified by others.

During Socrates' life, Athens was going through a dramatic transition from hegemony in the classical world to its decline after a humiliating defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. Athenians entered a period of instability and doubt about their identity and place in the world.

As a result, they clung to past glories, notions of wealth and a fixation on physical beauty. Socrates attacked these values with his insistent emphasis on the greater importance of the mind.

While many Athenians admired Socrates' challenges to Greek conventional wisdom and the humorous way he went about it, an equal number grew angry and felt he threatened their way of life and uncertain future.

Trial of Socrates

In 399 B.C., Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and of impiety, or heresy. He chose to defend himself in court.

Rather than present himself as wrongly accused, Socrates declared he fulfilled an important role as a gadfly, one who provides an important service to his community by continually questioning and challenging the status quo and its defenders.

The jury was not swayed by Socrates' defense and convicted him by a vote of 280 to 221. Possibly the defiant tone of his defense contributed to the verdict and he made things worse during the deliberation over his punishment.

Athenian law allowed a convicted citizen to propose an alternative punishment to the one called for by the prosecution and the jury would decide. Instead of proposing he be exiled, Socrates suggested he be honored by the city for his contribution to their enlightenment and be paid for his services.

The jury was not amused and sentenced him to death by drinking a mixture of poison hemlock.

Socrates' Death

Before Socrates' execution, friends offered to bribe the guards and rescue him so he could flee into exile.

He declined, stating he wasn't afraid of death, felt he would be no better off if in exile and said he was still a loyal citizen of Athens, willing to abide by its laws, even the ones that condemned him to death.

Plato described Socrates' execution in his Phaedo dialogue: Socrates drank the hemlock mixture without hesitation. Numbness slowly crept into his body until it reached his heart. Shortly before his final breath, Socrates described his death as a release of the soul from the body.

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QUICK FACTS

• Name: Socrates
• Birth Year: 470
• Birth City: Athens
• Birth Country: Greece
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher considered to be the main source of Western thought. He was condemned to death for his Socratic method of questioning.
• Education and Academia
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• Death Year: 399
• Death City: Athens
• Death Country: Greece

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Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, summary of socrates’ teachings.

© Darrell Arnold Ph.D .

Socrates’ biography

Socrates was of humble roots. In Nietzsche’s eyes: He was born of the rabble. His father was a stonemason, his mother was a midwife. As a young man, he is thought to have studied Greek natural philosophy. But he found the views of the natural philosophers too obscure and unsubstantiated. He thus, like the sophists, turned against natural philosophy to questions of morality and justice.

In Athens, he lived a life of simple means, married Xanthippe, with whom he had three children. He fought, evidently heroically, in the Peloponnesian war against Sparta. He was known in Athens for gathering and speaking in the Agora, the market place. He was known as unkempt, often unwashed, and for being quite homely … Yet many were attracted to him. He … gathered support from some Athenians who had been members and associates of the Thirty Tyrants, who had early led a bloody coup against the government in Athens and who were bitterly opposed to its democratic government.

According to Plato’s account, he … was motivated to his public discourse by an early Oracle of Delphi , which had indicated that no one in Greece was wiser than Socrates. In what we may take to be an ironic court defense, he maintains that he found this unbelievable so set out questioning the learned in Athens to find someone wiser than himself. In Plato’s account, Socrates’ questioning was unsettling to authorities in Athens, who thought that he was undermining the civic religion of Athens and corrupting the youth. Socrates was thus brought to court, where he was found guilty and sentenced to death. Socrates’ thus became a celebrated martyr for philosophy.

The examined life

Among the views for which Socrates is most famous is that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The ability to think, in Socrates’s view, is our unique human capacity. To live a life devoid of thinking — where we simply accepted what tradition and authority told us — was thus to live a less than fully human life. But what does an examined life, the fully human life, entail? For Socrates, it entailed questioning especially the moral and religious views of his tradition. In Socrates’ view, this examination is to be done as a form of moral or spiritual development — it is done with the intention of moral improvement both to oneself and ultimately to one’s community.

While it was traditionally thought that the existing laws of a polis were identified with the will of the gods, Socrates questions this. There were hints already in Heraclitus and others of a view like this — that there is another law a law above the city’s laws to which one had a greater alliance. Socrates’ life and death is a testimony to a belief in such a law and to a sensibility that adherence to that other law is imperative.

The clarification of concepts

Socrates is invested in the clarification of concepts, even if he does not always finish the job (or hardly ever does) and provides us with a clearly satisfying definition or description, even if often we need to look to what he does — as a character in Plato’s dialogues — if we want to answer some of the questions he poses.

Socrates engaged in his own self-examination with the clear conviction that he could come to understand truth, and that the means to do so was through the clarification of concepts, achieved not through individual self-reflection but through dialogue. This indeed is so marked in him that Aristotle thought it fundamental to the shift in ancient philosophy from the Presocratics to a new era in Greek thought. We see hints of it in thinkers previous to Socrates who are thinking of metaphysics — Parmenides being the main case in point. But it becomes full-blown and receives a new focus on questions of justice in Socrates. What is justice? What is piety? As individuals, living in a society, we have internalized views about what these things are. [But] Socrates thinks that self-examination involves us in a process of thinking through our own beliefs on these questions …

The Socratic method

Socrates maintained that he did not teach anyone. What he did was facilitate their own self-reflection through public dialogues. The disputational method Socrates used in the public forum led to his reputation as a gadfly, for his logic was often stinging. Taking some proposed general definition to a question like what is justice, he was merciless in criticizing its weaknesses, often indirectly and with irony. And he did not hesitate to embarrass the most recognized of the citizens of Athens.

This dialogical approach, [today] described as the Socratic method, was used not to propose his own views. Socrates was not a guru who answered the most obscure of metaphysical questions and sought adherents to the system he constructs. Rather his method was to engage in an exploration and to get those involved to reflect on their own views, on the culturally accepted views they had largely adopted. It focused on clarifying what the concepts under discussion meant, what presuppositions they entailed. It typically started with a definition of a concept, which would then be analyzed, broke into discrete parts; then on the basis of the analysis, the ideas were synthesized.

In his public dialogues, Socrates appears to be motivated by a faith that the analysis of concepts should lead to positive results. Yet curiously perhaps, Socrates did not develop a set of clear ideas about what justice is, what piety is or the other things that he discussed so enthusiastically. He deconstructs much more than he constructs.

Socratic wisdom

Indeed, this [is] even fundamental to what becomes known as Socratic wisdom. In Plato’s rendering of Socrates’ story in  The Apology , when … Oracle of Delphi [told Socrates]  … that none was wiser than him, Socrates [was] skeptically. He claims it inspired him to begin to discuss ideas in public. Not feeling wise at all, he was sure — he says with some irony — there must have been others wiser than himself. In the court case where he discusses this, he notes however that after years of such questioning and public conversation he did come to recognize that there was some truth to the Oracle. He had a kind of wisdom. His wisdom, which others lacked, was simply in knowing the limitations of his own knowledge. Socrates’s wisdom consisted in knowledge of his own ignorance.

It is an interesting paradox perhaps that one of the individuals most celebrated for his wisdom in world history in fact baldly claimed that this wisdom consisted in so little. The fact is that those who have viewed Socrates as wise have never really taken this explicit statement of what his wisdom was to be the complete story. Socrates was trying to clarify concepts, but as a statement even of what his own wisdom was, this is quite incomplete — a negative definition only.

If that is all there were to Socratic wisdom, then we might have imagined this serving as a footnote in Ancient philosophy. But of course, much of what we have taken to be Socratic wisdom has consisted not in what was said, but in what was unsaid. It comes from an examination of how Socrates lived his life. And here there is much more indeed than is summarized in the negative description of wisdom.

Is his statement that he is wise because he recognizes what he does not know simply a case of irony? Is it likely not offered as a definition at all? In any case, if we want to know what Socrates wisdom consists in then an examination of his life offers us something much richer to work with than his negative definition. In his life, … Socrates is someone deeply curious, conscientious about self-examination, which he engaged in as a practice of self-improvement. Socrates is wise because of his care for the soul, because of his questioning whether his own priorities in life were rightly ordered and whether his own life was just and good … when it comes to understanding what he thinks, we have to do more than examine what he says. We must see how he lives.

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5 thoughts on “ summary of socrates’ teachings ”.

Thanks for writing this. Reading it provides me with an insight I lacked, first into Socrates and then into implications for modern philosophy. Modern philosophy, following Socrates, is perhaps as much about deconstructing as constructing. That in part may explain why communicating about my own area of interest, the science of socially moral behaviors (behaviors advocated by past and present moral codes and motivated by our moral sense), is so difficult. The science is about constructing a coherent understanding of morality as natural phenomena. A philosopher might be thinking, at least in part, of “deconstructing” morality as natural phenomena (“But what makes it ‘moral’?”) which, as a kind of category error, may be innately incoherent.

No disagreement with the Examined Life. Yet, looking at both ‘sides’, there is something to be said for ignorance is bliss:

“It is an interesting paradox perhaps that one of the individuals most celebrated for his wisdom in world history in fact baldly claimed that this wisdom consisted in so little.”

No mystery about it: knowledge/wisdom are necessary for progress. But the unintended consequence is, merely for starters, that the more complex, the more the deceit. Simplicity is honesty– and vice versa. Complexity, complication = obfuscation, subterfuge. Necessary but not good, save for someone with no conscience.

Thus wisdom does consist in so little. To throw out a number, say that wisdom is 95% of nothing; 5% of something. The 5% of wisdom being something, makes it worthwhile. After all we are here in this moment at the Reason and Meaning site, reading or writing. The [hypothetical] 5% value of wisdom must in fact mean something to us.

Mark and Alan: Thanks for the comments. It is important, I think, to highlight the deconstructive character of Socrates’ as opposed to Plato’s views. Mark, I think you’re right to see parallels with today’s deconstructivists. We can see how they also follow the ancient skeptics, who also took their lead from Socrates. The skeptics would famously construct arguments, rather like Kantian antinomies, but on a wide variety of issues, showing mutually attractive but ultimately not fully compelling arguments on both sides of important issues. Maybe the ancient skeptics follow more closely in his footsteps than his most famous student and he wouldn’t have been all that pleased with his student and system builder.

PS, not that ignorance is bliss albeit ignorance can be bliss. For starters, with today’s information overload, who would want to have a comprehensive knowledge (leaving aside wisdom) of what is going on in the world?

In Socrates time information overload did not present the difficulty it does in the 21st century. During all of BCE, one could master mathematics, science as it were– and all the rest with requisite intelligence and patience.

As for wisdom?: that would take a book merely to begin with.

“You will know you are wise, when you are calm , happy, joyful, and unshaken; you will live on the plane of the gods” Seneca

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Philosophy of Education Behind every school and every teacher is a set of related beliefs--a philosophy of education--that influences what and how students are taught. A philosophy of education represents answers to questions about the purpose of schooling, a teacher's role, and what should be taught and by what methods. Teacher-centered philosophies tend to be more authoritarian and conservative, and emphasize the values and knowledge that have survived through time. The major teacher-centered philosophies of education are essentialism and perennialism. Student-centered philosophies are more focused on individual needs, contemporary relevance, and preparing students for a changing future. School is seen as an institution that works with youth to improve society or help students realize their individuality. Progressivism, social reconstructionism, and existentialism place the learner at the center of the educational process: Students and teachers work together on determining what should be learned and how best to learn it. y? Essentialism focuses on teaching the essential elements of academic and moral knowledge. Essentialists urge that schools get back to the basics; they believe in a strong core curriculum and high academic standards. Perennialism focuses on the universal truths that have withstood the test of time. Perennialists urge that students read the Great Books and develop their understanding of the philosophical concepts that underlie human knowledge. Progressivism is based largely on the belief that lessons must be relevant to the students in order for them to learn. The curriculum of a progressivist school is built around the personal experiences, interests, and needs of the students. Social reconstructionists separated from progressivism because they desired more direct and immediate attention to societal ills. They are interested in combining study and social action, and believe that education can and should go hand in hand with ameliorating social problems. Existentialism is derived from a powerful belief in human free will, and the need for individuals to shape their own futures. Students in existentialist classrooms control their own education. Students are encouraged to understand and appreciate their uniqueness and to assume responsibility for their actions. Essentialism and perennialism give teachers the power to choose the curriculum, organize the school day, and construct classroom activities. The curriculum reinforces a predominantly Western heritage while viewing the students as vessels to be filled and disciplined in the proven strategies of the past. Essentialists focus on cultural literacy, while perennialists work from the Great Books. Progressivism, social reconstructionism, and existentialism view the learner as the central focus of classroom activities. Working with student interests and needs, teachers serve as guides and facilitators in assisting students to reach their goals. The emphasis is on the future, and on preparing students to be independent-thinking adults. Progressivists strive for relevant, hands-on learning. Social reconstructionists want students to actively work to improve society. Existentialists give students complete freedom, and complete responsibility, with regard to their education. Constructivism has its roots in cognitive psychology, and is based on the idea that people construct their understanding of the world. Constructivist teachers gauge a student's prior knowledge, then carefully orchestrate cues, classroom activities, and penetrating questions to push students to higher levels of understanding. B. F. Skinner advocated behaviorism as an effective teaching strategy. According to Skinner, rewards motivate students to learn material even if they do not fully understand why it will have value in their futures. Behavior modification is a system of gradually lessening extrinsic rewards. The practices and beliefs of peoples in other parts of the world, such as informal and oral education, offer useful insights for enhancing our own educational practices, but they are insights too rarely considered, much less implemented. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle are the three most legendary ancient Greek philosophers. Socrates is hailed today as the personification of wisdom and the philosophical life. He gave rise to what is now called the Socratic method, in which the teacher repeatedly questions students to help them clarify their own deepest thoughts. Plato, Socrates's pupil, crafted eloquent dialogues that present different philosophical positions on a number of profound questions. Plato believed that a realm of externally existing"ideas," or"forms," underlies the physical world. Aristotle, Plato's pupil, was remarkable for the breadth as well as the depth of his knowledge. He provided a synthesis of Plato's belief in the universal, spiritual forms and a scientist's belief in the physical world we observe through our senses. He taught that the virtuous life consists of controlling desires by reason and by choosing the moderate path between extremes. Metaphysics deals with the nature of reality, its origin, and its structure. Metaphysical beliefs are reflected in curricular choices: Should we study the natural world, or focus on spiritual or ideal forms? Epistemology examines the nature and origin of human knowledge. Epistemological beliefs influence teaching methods."How we know" is closely related to how we learn and therefore, how we should teach. Ethics is the study of what is"good" or"bad" in human behavior, thoughts, and feelings. What should we teach about"good" and"bad," and should we teach that directly, or by modeling? Political philosophy analyzes how past and present societies are arranged and governed and proposes ways to create better societies in the future. How will a classroom be organized, and what will that say about who wields power? How will social institutions and national governments be analyzed? Aesthetics is concerned with the nature of beauty. What is of worth? What works are deemed of value to be studied or emulated? To learn more about the book this website supports, please visit its . and . is one of the many fine businesses of . You must be a registered user to view the in this website. If you already have a username and password, enter it below. If your textbook came with a card and this is your first visit to this site, you can to register, or . 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What did socrates teach, how do we know what socrates thought, why did athens condemn socrates to death, why didn’t socrates try to escape his death sentence. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. McClintock and Strong Biblical Cyclopedia - Socrates Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Socrates PBS LearningMedia - Socrates and the Early Senate | The Greeks Ancient Origins - Socrates: The Father of Western Philosophy World History Encyclopedia - Biography of Socrates The Open University - The Life of Socrates Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Socrates (469–399 BC) Age of the Sage - Transmitting the Wisdoms of the Ages - Biography of Socrates Florida State College at Jacksonville Pressbooks - Philosophy in the Humanities - Socrates Humanities LibreTexts - The Life of Socrates Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Biography of Socrates Socrates - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11) Socrates - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up) Table Of Contents Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher, one of the three greatest figures of the ancient period of Western philosophy (the others were Plato and Aristotle ), who lived in Athens in the 5th century BCE. A legendary figure even in his own time, he was admired by his followers for his integrity, his self-mastery, his profound philosophical insight, and his great argumentative skill. He was the first Greek philosopher to seriously explore questions of ethics . His influence on the subsequent course of ancient philosophy was so great that the cosmologically oriented philosophers who generally preceded him are conventionally referred to as the “ pre-Socratics .” Socrates professed not to teach anything (and indeed not to know anything important) but only to seek answers to urgent human questions (e.g., “What is virtue?” and “What is justice?”) and to help others do the same. His style of philosophizing was to engage in public conversations about some human excellence and, through skillful questioning, to show that his interlocutors did not know what they were talking about. Despite the negative results of these encounters, Socrates did hold some broad positive views, including that virtue is a form of knowledge and that “care of the soul” (the cultivation of virtue) is the most important human obligation. 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 as by Plato’s student Aristotle , who acquired his knowledge of Socrates through his teacher. The most vivid portraits of Socrates exist in Plato’s dialogues, in most of which the principal speaker is “Socrates.” However, the views expressed by the character are not consistent across the dialogues, and in some dialogues the character expresses views that are clearly Plato’s own. Scholars continue to disagree about which of the dialogues convey the views of the historical Socrates and which use the character simply as a mouthpiece for Plato’s philosophy. Socrates was widely hated in Athens, mainly because he regularly embarrassed people by making them appear ignorant and foolish. He was also an outspoken critic of democracy , which Athenians cherished, and he was associated with some members of the Thirty Tyrants , who briefly overthrew Athens’s democratic government in 404–403 BCE. He was arguably guilty of the crimes with which he was charged, impiety and corrupting the youth, because he did reject the city’s gods and he did inspire disrespect for authority among his youthful followers (though that was not his intention). He was accordingly convicted and sentenced to death by poison. 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 elements of the charges and famously declared that "the unexamined life is not worth living." After being convicted, he could have proposed a reasonable penalty short of death but initially refused. He finally rejected an offer of escape as inconsistent with his commitment never to do wrong (escaping would show disrespect for the laws and harm the reputations of his family and friends). 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 plays of comic dramatists. (The Clouds of Aristophanes , produced in 423, is the best-known example.) Although Socrates himself wrote nothing, he is depicted in conversation in compositions by a small circle of his admirers— Plato and Xenophon first among them. He is portrayed in these works as a man of great insight, integrity , self-mastery, and argumentative skill. The impact of his life was all the greater because of the way in which it ended: at age 70, he was brought to trial on a charge of impiety and sentenced to death by poisoning (the poison probably being hemlock ) by a jury of his fellow citizens. Plato’s Apology of Socrates purports to be the speech Socrates gave at his trial in response to the accusations made against him (Greek apologia means “defense”). Its powerful advocacy of the examined life and its condemnation of Athenian democracy have made it one of the central documents of Western thought and culture . Philosophical and literary sources While Socrates was alive, he was, as noted, the object of comic ridicule, but most of the plays that make reference to him are entirely lost or exist only in fragmentary form— Clouds being the chief exception. Although Socrates is the central figure of this play, it was not Aristophanes’ purpose to give a balanced and accurate portrait of him (comedy never aspires to this) but rather to use him to represent certain intellectual trends in contemporary Athens—the study of language and nature and, as Aristophanes implies, the amoralism and atheism that accompany these pursuits. The value of the play as a reliable source of knowledge about Socrates is thrown further into doubt by the fact that, in Plato’s Apology , Socrates himself rejects it as a fabrication. This aspect of the trial will be discussed more fully below. Soon after Socrates’ death, several members of his circle preserved and praised his memory by writing works that represent him in his most characteristic activity—conversation. His interlocutors in these (typically adversarial) exchanges included people he happened to meet, devoted followers, prominent political figures, and leading thinkers of the day. Many of these “Socratic discourses,” as Aristotle calls them in his Poetics , are no longer extant; there are only brief remnants of the conversations written by Antisthenes , Aeschines , Phaedo , and Eucleides. But those composed by Plato and Xenophon survive in their entirety. What knowledge we have of Socrates must therefore depend primarily on one or the other (or both, when their portraits coincide) of these sources. (Plato and Xenophon also wrote separate accounts, each entitled Apology of Socrates , of Socrates’ trial.) Most scholars, however, do not believe that every Socratic discourse of Xenophon and Plato was intended as a historical report of what the real Socrates said, word-for-word, on some occasion. What can reasonably be claimed about at least some of these dialogues is that they convey the gist of the questions Socrates asked, the ways in which he typically responded to the answers he received, and the general philosophical orientation that emerged from these conversations. Among the compositions of Xenophon , the one that gives the fullest portrait of Socrates is Memorabilia . The first two chapters of Book I of this work are especially important, because they explicitly undertake a refutation of the charges made against Socrates at his trial; they are therefore a valuable supplement to Xenophon’s Apology , which is devoted entirely to the same purpose. The portrait of Socrates that Xenophon gives in Books III and IV of Memorabilia seems, in certain passages, to be heavily influenced by his reading of some of Plato’s dialogues, and so the evidentiary value of at least this portion of the work is diminished. Xenophon’s Symposium is a depiction of Socrates in conversation with his friends at a drinking party (it is perhaps inspired by a work of Plato of the same name and character) and is regarded by some scholars as a valuable re-creation of Socrates’ thought and way of life. Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (literally: “estate manager”), a Socratic conversation concerning household organization and the skills needed by the independent farmer, is Xenophon’s attempt to bring the qualities he admired in Socrates to bear upon the subject of overseeing one’s property. It is unlikely to have been intended as a report of one of Socrates’ conversations. 198 IMAGES Socrates Educational Philosophy Educationists Philosophy Socrates: Biography, Greek Philosopher, Socratic Method Socrates Forward: Educational Philosophy Contributions of Socrates, Plato & Aristotle towards educati by Veen VIDEO Socrates' Philosophy (Tagalog-English) Plato's Ethics Unlocking The Secrets Of Socrates Your Mind Is Your Predicament -Socrates #ancientphilosophy #socrates #stoic #philosophy #stoicism Political thoughts of Socrates || Socrates Philosophy || Quick Review || 01 Phaedo and Socrates' Philosophy Episode 31 : Keeping the Greatest Conversation Alive! COMMENTS PDF Socrates: Philosophy applied to Education Vol. 2, No. 2 Batista: Socrates: Philosophy applied to Education - Search for Virtue 150 politic (civic) ones, made of his reflection one of the main water divisors in the ambit of the history of philosophy as well as in the ambit of the history of education. The reason for which here one defends Socrates as an innovator, both in Socratic method teaching. dialectic. lecture. Socratic method, a form of logical argumentation originated by the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (c. 470-399 bce). Although the term is now generally used as a name for any educational strategy that involves the cross-examination of students by their teacher, the method used by Socrates in the conversations ... Socrates' Influence on Educational Philosophy Conclusion. Through his unique approach to learning, Socrates has left an indelible mark on the field of education. His emphasis on critical thinking, self-knowledge, and the pursuit of truth has influenced educational philosophies for millennia. By adopting and adapting his methods, modern education continues to benefit from the wisdom of this ... What Is a Socratic Education? In the broad sphere of education, one often hears of Socratic teaching, Socratic circles, and so on. These educational frameworks have their conceptual roots in the work of Plato as he reports on Socrates' conversations. For example, in the Meno, there is an exchange between Socrates and a boy who was a slave. Socrates' life and contributions to philosophy Socrates, (born c. 470 bce, Athens—died 399 bce, Athens), ancient Greek philosopher whose way of life, character, and thought exerted a profound influence on ancient and modern philosophy.. Because Socrates wrote nothing, information about his personality and doctrine is derived chiefly from depictions of his conversations and other information in the dialogues of Plato, in the Memorabilia ... Socrates The philosopher Socrates remains, as he was in his lifetime (469-399 B.C.E.), [] 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 disputed, but his trial and death at the hands of the ... Philosophy of Education Philosophy of Education. Philosophy of education is the branch of applied or practical philosophy concerned with the nature and aims of education and the philosophical problems arising from educational theory and practice. Because that practice is ubiquitous in and across human societies, its social and individual manifestations so varied, and ... Socrates Socrates. (469—399 B.C.E.) Socrates is one of the few individuals whom one could say has so-shaped the cultural and intellectual development of the world that, without him, history would be profoundly different. He is best known for his association with the Socratic method of question and answer, his claim that he was ignorant (or aware of ... Education, history of philosophy of 1. Socrates and the sophists. Educational philosophy began in the Greek classical period with the examination of the educational claims of the sophists undertaken by Socrates. The sophists brought higher education to the democratized Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries bc, offering those who aspired to political leadership a training in ... Philosophy of education The history of philosophy of education is an important source of concerns and issues—as is the history of education itself—for setting the intellectual agenda of contemporary philosophers of education. Equally relevant is the range of contemporary approaches to the subject. Although it is not possible here to review systematically either ... Socrates ‑ Life & Philosophy Viewed by many as the founding figure of Western philosophy, Socrates (469-399 B.C.) is at once the most exemplary and the strangest of the Greek philosophers. He grew up during the golden age of ... Socrates: His Beliefs and Philosophy Socrates was an ancient Greek philosopher, often considered one of the founders of Western philosophy, who lived in Athens during the 5th century BC. Image: A painting by French painter Jacques-Louis David (1787) on the Death of Socrates. Socrates' death has been described as a very tragic one. Chapter Summary Chapter Summary. What is a philosophy of education, and why should it be important to you? Behind every school and every teacher is a set of related beliefs—a philosophy of education—that influences what and how students are taught. A philosophy of education answers questions about the purpose of schooling, a teacher's role, what should be ... The Socratic Movement Summary This chapter contains sections titled: Education in Classical Athens Socrates (470/69-399 bce) Plato (428-347/8 bce) Aristotle (384-322 bce) Conclusion The Socratic Movement - A Companion to the Philosophy of Education - Wiley Online Library Socrates: Biography, Greek Philosopher, Socratic Method Socrates was a scholar, teacher and philosopher born in ancient Greece. His Socratic method laid the groundwork for Western systems of logic and philosophy. When the political climate of Greece ... PDF Plato's Socrates, Philosophy and Education Plato's Socrates, Philosophy and Education. 3319713558, Pages: 140, Year: 2017Search for book at Amazon.comThe relative absence of philosophical questioning in schools is not only an intellectual and pedagogical. problem; it poses risks and consequences for our broader society. To help combat this problem, James M. Magrini argues that we shoul. Summary of Socrates' Teachings The examined life. Among the views for which Socrates is most famous is that "the unexamined life is not worth living.". The ability to think, in Socrates's view, is our unique human capacity. To live a life devoid of thinking — where we simply accepted what tradition and authority told us — was thus to live a less than fully human life. Philosophy of Education The major teacher-centered philosophies of education are essentialism and perennialism. Student-centered philosophies are more focused on individual needs, contemporary relevance, and preparing students for a changing future. School is seen as an institution that works with youth to improve society or help students realize their individuality. Socrates Socrates (/ ˈ s ɒ k r ə t iː z /; [2] Greek: Σωκράτης; c. 470 - 399 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy [3] and as among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his ... Socrates 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 ... The Wisdom of Socrates: Three Famous Quotes Explained Quote No. 1 - "The unexamined life is not worth living." The first quote comes from Plato's Apology (38a) dialogue where Socrates is delivering a speech before the jury of 501 fellow male Athenians. At the age of seventy he had been indicted for breaking the law against "impiety"; that is, for offending the Olympian gods Zeus, Apollo, and the rest. essay homework paper phd project resume review speech study thesis