Socrates c 469 bc to 399 bc

As Russell points out, it is of course difficult to really know how much we know about Socrates. He wrote nothing himself during a life which ended in him being condemned to death and executed at the age of around seventy but a great deal was written about him, mainly by two of his pupils, Xenophon and Plato.

Both of their accounts are problematic, Xenophon's perhaps because he was not much of a philosopher, and Plato's because he was too much of a philosopher and used Socrates as a vehicle for his own ideas. All of Plato's works are written in the form of Socratic dialogues where Socrates discusses and examines ideas with others, usually showing their assumptions to be false, and it is hard to separate where Plato is attempting to faithfully record the ideas of Socrates and where he is putting his own ideas into Socrates' mouth. For example, as Popper has pointed out, in The Apology Plato recounts Socrates being sentenced to death for, in part, refusing to stop teaching the young men of Athens. However, by the time we get to Plato's Republic he has Socrates arguing that in an ideal society education and philosophy should not be accessible to the young.

Russell takes the by now fairly conventional view that the earlier works of Plato, in particular The Apology, are most likely to more closely represent an accurate historical view of Socrates and his ideas and that the later works represent the views of Plato. He therefore focuses particularly on The Apology and keeps the later dialogues for his chapters on Plato.

The Apology tells of the trial of Socrates and his answer to the charges laid against him, which were that 'Socrates is an evil-doer and a curious person, searching into things under the earth and above the heaven; and making the worse appear the better cause, and teaching all this to others.' The prosecution alleged that Socrates was guilty of not worshiping the gods the State worshiped but introducing other new divinities, and further that he was guilty of corrupting the young by teaching them accordingly.

In reality, the trial also had a political context, in particular because of his connection to the aristocratic party and the regime of the Thirty Tyrants prior to the current democratic regime. Contrary to the idealised view of Socrates as a 'pure' thinker he fought in wars and was involved in the politics of the time. What his politics actually were, however, is the subject of some debate and one of the reasons that Socrates is so attractive a figure is perhaps because people can construct their own version of Socrates to suit their ideas. Popper highlights his disagreements with the regime of the thirty tyrants and firmly sees Socrates as fundamentally equalitarian, individualistic and democratic and attributes the totalitarian aspects of later works entirely to Plato. However, as Waterfield has pointed out, Socrates did have strong links as well as occasional conflicts with the aristocratic, anti-democratic camp in Athens being the teacher of Critias, leader of the Thirty Tyrants, and the friend and lover of Alcibiades who was also at times a key player in the arguing for, and establishment of, the Oligarchy.

At the trial Socrates was found guilty by a majority and he was then, as was usual, given the opportunity to suggest a lesser punishment than the death penalty; for example exile. The judges would then choose whether to apply the penalty demanded by the prosecution or that suggested by the defendant. In typically Socratic fashion, Socrates recommended a punishment of a laughably small fine and the court was so annoyed that he was, by some accounts, condemned to death by an even bigger majority than that which found him guilty.

During his speech Socrates explains the reason that he has spent much of his life annoying people by going around Athens questioning their beliefs and ideas. Apparently, the Oracle of Delphi was once asked if there were any men wiser than Socrates and it replied that there were not. Socrates claims that he couldn't understand why the Oracle had said this yet knew that a god could not lie. So he went around questioning men who were known to be wise to see if their ideas stood up to scrutiny and found that they were not, in fact, wise. Understandably he made many enemies by doing this. He concluded that the Oracle was correct, but only by illustrating that 'He, O men, is wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing.'

Socrates then answers the accusations of Meletus and argues that as good men are better to live among than bad men he cannot have intentionally corrupted his fellow citizens and if he has corrupted them unintentionally then he should be instructed by Meletus rather than prosecuted. He then answers the charges of impiety on the basis that the charge of atheism contradicted the original charge. It is important to understand that impiety was not a private matter as we would perceive it now but was seen as being likely to bring misfortune upon the whole community.

After the verdict he speaks movingly of why he is unafraid of death, ending with the words 'The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die and you to live. Which is better God only knows.'

Russell makes several points about Socrates. Firstly, that Socrates represents a movement away from the scientific to purely ethical concerns, the early Socratic dialogues being mainly attempts to examine and define ethical terms such as temperance, moderation, friendship and courage. Although Socrates claims that he is wiser than others only in that he knows that he knows nothing, at the same time he sees knowledge as essential. In particular he sees knowledge as essential for, and inevitably resulting in, virtue.

Secondly, the method Socrates uses is dialectic; seeking knowledge by question and answer and this method is useful for some things but not others. The method is useful where what is being debated is logical rather than factual and in particular it can show whether someone's arguments are logically consistent or not. Although it can be useful to determine whether an argument is logically consistent, it doesn't help us to discover new facts. For this, the empiricism of science is needed.

One problem with the dialectic approach is that it is perfectly possible for an argument to be on the one hand internally consistent and yet complete nonsense. One of the key problems with thinking about political and social issues is precisely the difficulty of applying empirical methods in those areas. In science, someone can come up with a seemingly rational, logically consistent argument and it can be tested empirically to determine whether the theory holds true in the real world but it is much harder to do this with political ideas. Western history is littered with internally logically consistent political ideas that have, however, proven to be disastrous when applied to in the real world.