Socrates: Philosophy in an Hour

Paul Strathern

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780007466115
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Philosophy for busy people. Read a succinct account of the philosophy of Socrates in just one hour.

Socrates’ Life and Works

Socrates was born in 469 B.C. in a village on the slopes of Mount Lycabettus, which was then a twenty-minute walk from Athens. His father was a sculptor and his mother a midwife. Initially the young Socrates was apprenticed to his father; according to one tradition, he worked on The Three Muses in Their Habits which adorned the Acropolis. He was then sent to study with Anaxagoras.

Socrates went on to study under the philosopher Archelaus, “by whom he was beloved in the worst sense,” according to Diogenes Laertius, the third-century A.D. biographer. In ancient Greece, as still in much of the eastern Mediterranean, homosexuality was regarded as a quite acceptable diversion. Not until the advent of Christianity was a limited heterodox approach to replace such orthodox sexual practice. So while Anaxagoras was forced to flee Athens in fear of his life for teaching his pupils that the sun was a radiant star, Archelaus remained free to indulge in more than intellectual intercourse with his pupils.

With Archelaus, Socrates studied mathematics and astronomy as well as the teachings of earlier philosophers. Philosophy had been pursued for just over a century and was very much the nuclear physics of the age. Indeed, the world of philosophy (which consisted entirely of water, then fire, then points of light, and so on) bore as much relation to the real world as the world of modern nuclear physics bears to our own everyday reality. We scarcely regard our encounters with mesons as the highlight of our daily existence, and one suspects that the ancient Greeks had a similarly blasé attitude toward the latest revelation that their world was in fact a goldfish bowl, a furnace, or a fireworks display.

Socrates soon decided that these speculations about the nature of the world were of no possible benefit to humanity. For an ostensibly reasonable thinker, Socrates was curiously antiscientific. Here he was almost certainly influenced by one of the greatest pre-Socratic philosophers, Parmenides of Elea. During his youth Socrates is said to have met the aging Parmenides and “learned much from him.” Parmenides resolved the conflict between those who believed the world was made up of a single substance (such as water or fire) and those like Anaxagoras who believed it consisted of a great many substances. He overcame this conflict by the simple method of ignoring it. According to Parmenides, the world as we know it is merely an illusion. It doesn’t matter how many things we think it is made of, because it doesn’t exist. The only true reality consists of eternal Being, which is infinite, unchanging, and indivisible. For this Being there is no past and no future: it subsumes the entire universe and everything that can possibly happen in it. “All is one” was Parmenides’ basic principle. The ever-changing multiplicity we observe is merely the appearance of this static, all-embracing Being. Such an attitude to the world is scarcely favourable to science. Why bother with the workings of the world when they are nothing but an illusion?

In these early days philosophy was considered the study of all knowledge. (In Greek, philosopher means “lover of wisdom.”) Mathematics, science, and cosmology did not exist as such; for centuries they were considered part of philosophy. As late as the seventeenth century Newton called his masterpiece on gravity and the workings of the universe Philosophicae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). Only through the years did philosophy come to be regarded by many as the study of metaphysical – and thus unanswerable – questions. Whenever philosophy actually found the answers to questions, it ceased to be philosophy and became something else – a separate subject such as mathematics or physics. The most recent example of this is usually considered to be psychiatry, which claimed to answer a number of questions and immediately set up shop as a separate science. (In fact it does not fulfill the philosophic requirements of a science, which demand a set of principles that can be tested by experiment – requirements not fulfilled by the inexactitudes of paranoia, psychoanalytic cures for dementia, and other forms of psychopathic disorder.)

In Socrates’ time this entire field was of course considered part of philosophy (and philosophers were popularly regarded by the citizens of Athens much as the public today regards psychiatrists). Socrates’ attitude toward philosophy was certainly psychological in the original sense of the word. (In Greek, psychology means “the study of the mind.”) But he was no scientist. The influence of Parmenides saw to that. Reality was an illusion. This had a negative effect on Socrates and his successor Plato. During their lifetimes a few significant advances were made in mathematics, but only because this was considered timeless and abstract, and thus thought to be in some way connected with the ultimate reality of Being. Fortunately their successor Aristotle had a different attitude toward the world. He became in many ways the founder of science, and drew philosophy back toward reality. But the unscientific – indeed, antiscientific – attitude that developed with Socrates was to cast a blight on philosophy for centuries to come.

Largely as a result of Socrates’ antiscientific attitude, the few great scientific minds of the ancient Greek world worked outside philosophy. Archimedes (in physics), Hippocrates (in medicine), and to a certain extent Euclid (in geometry) were isolated from philosophy and thus from any developing tradition of knowledge and argument. Ancient Greek scientists knew the earth went around the sun, knew it was round, and even calculated its circumference. They observed electricity and were aware that the earth had a magnetic field. Outside the “universal wisdom” of philosophy, such factual bits of knowledge were isolated to the status of oddities. We owe a great deal to Socrates for placing philosophy on the sound basis of reason. But the fact that philosophy came of age under the aegis of an antiscientist must count as one of the great misfortunes of human learning. It is difficult to overemphasise the significance of this missed opportunity. The mental energy expended in the Middle Ages calculating the number of angels who could stand on the head of a pin might instead have been dealing with the atoms first posited by Democritus.

Rather than questioning the world, Socrates believed we would be better off questioning ourselves. He adopted the celebrated maxim “Gnothi seauton” – Know thyself. (This saying is sometimes erroneously attributed to Socrates. In fact it may well have been coined by the first philosopher of all, Thales; it is also known to have been inscribed at the Delphic Oracle.)

Socrates began expounding his philosophy in the Agora, the marketplace of ancient Athens, whose extensive ruins are still visible beneath the Acropolis. Socrates’ favorite spot here was the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherius, a shady colonnade lined with stallholders selling wares. The stone foundations of this stoa can still be traced quite plainly. They are truncated at their northern end by the busy Athens-Piraeus metro, and from beyond th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Socrates’ Life and Works
• Afterword
• Further Information
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher