Philosophy
Socrates: Method, Ideas and 8 Solved Exercises
Socrates wrote nothing, and his method has two stages: irony and maieutics. Summary with tables, common mistakes and 8 exercises.
Recommended for: Grade 11 · Grade 12
Socrates (Athens, 470/469 - 399 BC) never wrote a line, never charged a fee and never founded a school, and yet Western philosophy divides into a before and an after around him. His method has two moves, in strict order: irony, which demolishes false certainty, and maieutics, which helps deliver a definition.
Who Socrates was, and why he wrote nothing
He was born in Athens to Sophroniscus, a stonemason, and Phaenarete, a midwife. He served as a hoplite at Potidaea, Delium and Amphipolis, and lived through the whole Peloponnesian War and its aftermath, including the two oligarchic coups that convulsed the city: those are the years covered in the summary of ancient Greece.
He left no writings, and not out of laziness. For Socrates, philosophy is an exchange between living people, in which the question adapts to the person being asked. A book says the same thing to everyone and cannot reply to a reader who challenges it.
The consequence is a serious historical problem, the Socratic problem: everything we know about him comes from other people, and the four main witnesses do not agree.
The sources: the Socratic problem
| Source | Works | Picture it gives | Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plato | early dialogues: Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, Laches, Charmides | the inquirer who refutes and never concludes | in the mature dialogues Socrates speaks for Plato |
| Xenophon | Memorabilia, Apology, Symposium | a teacher of practical morality and common sense | he was not a philosopher: he flattens the theoretical difficulties |
| Aristophanes | Clouds (423 BC) | a comic-stage Sophist, speculating on the heavens and teaching how to win unjust cases | a comic caricature, written twenty-four years before the trial |
| Aristotle | Metaphysics, Nicomachean Ethics | the inventor of the universal definition and of inductive reasoning | he never met him: born in 384 BC, fifteen years after Socrates’ death |
The working rule for study is simple: when a claim appears in the early Plato and is confirmed by Aristotle, it can be attributed to the historical Socrates with reasonable confidence.
The turn: from nature to man
The philosophers before him look for the arche, the principle everything is made of: that is the inquiry described in the summary of the Presocratics. Socrates abandons the question, not because he thinks it is wrong but because he thinks it is useless: knowing what the stars are made of helps no one live better.
Cicero later summed up the change in a phrase that became proverbial: Socrates brought philosophy down from the sky to the earth, into the cities and the homes. The subject becomes man, and more precisely the psyche, the soul as the seat of intelligence and character. Caring for the soul is for him the first task, before the body and before wealth.
Socrates and the Sophists: what divides them
Socrates shares the turn towards man with the Sophists, and to Athenian eyes the resemblance was close enough that Aristophanes put him on stage as one of them. The differences cover everything else.
| Sophists | Socrates | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose of argument | to persuade, to win the case | to define, to find what is true |
| Form | makrology, the long continuous speech | brachylogy, short question and answer |
| Truth | relative to the individual or to the city | universal, valid for everyone |
| Payment | they teach for a fee | he refuses money |
| Typical outcome | a winning thesis | usually aporia, that is, no conclusion at all |
| Relation to the pupil | transmits content and technique | draws out what the other can find for himself |
Refusing payment is not a moral detail. Anyone who charges has to deliver a result, and therefore has to sell certainties. Anyone genuinely searching cannot promise them.
The Socratic method: irony and maieutics
The method is dialogue, and it falls into two stages that come in order. Many of the terms below are transliterations from Greek; if the letters slow you down, the guide to the Greek alphabet covers the pronunciation.
First stage: irony and refutation
Irony (eironeia, literally “dissimulation”) is not sarcasm. Socrates pretends not to know and asks his interlocutor to instruct him, so that the other person commits first, with a thesis to defend.
Then comes refutation (elenchus). Socrates does not set out a rival thesis: he provisionally accepts his opponent’s, draws out the consequences, and shows that they collide with premises the opponent himself had granted. The contradiction does not arrive from outside; it emerges from within the opponent’s own position.
The result is aporia (aporia, “no way through”): the interlocutor discovers he does not know what he thought he knew. In the Meno (80a) Socrates is compared to the torpedo fish, which numbs whatever touches it. It is a negative result, but an indispensable one: as long as someone believes he knows, he does not look.
Second stage: maieutics
Maieutics (maieutike techne, “the midwife’s art”) is the constructive moment. In the Theaetetus (149a-151d) Socrates explains that he practises his mother Phaenarete’s trade, but on souls: he is himself barren of wisdom, and precisely for that reason he can help others deliver their own thoughts and tell the sound ideas from the ones that will not survive.
The decisive point is that maieutics transmits no content. It guides with questions, not with answers. And it can only start after aporia: someone still convinced he knows has nothing to deliver.
”I know that I know nothing” and the Delphic oracle
His friend Chaerephon asks the oracle at Delphi whether anyone is wiser than Socrates; the Pythia says no. Socrates, convinced he knows nothing, treats the answer as a riddle to be tested and starts questioning those with a reputation for wisdom.
Politicians, poets and craftsmen all give the same result. The first cannot define the justice they talk about every day; the second cannot explain their own work, which comes from inspiration; the third really do possess a technical skill, but for that very reason believe themselves expert on the most important questions as well.
The conclusion is that the oracle was true in an unexpected sense: Socrates’ advantage lies not in what he knows but in the fact that he has no illusion of knowing. Watch the wording, though: in the Apology Socrates does not say “I know that I know nothing” in those words, but something sharper, namely that what he does not know he does not believe he knows either.
The search for a definition
Asked “what is courage?”, an interlocutor almost always answers with an example: the man who holds his position in battle. Socrates rejects that move, because an example does not explain why that case counts as a case of courage.
What he wants is the definition, the answer to the question ti esti, “what is it?”: a feature present in every case and absent from every case that is not one. The procedure starts from many particular cases and works back to the shared feature, which is precisely what Aristotle credits him with in Metaphysics XIII 4: inductive arguments and the universal definition.
Socratic intellectualism: virtue is knowledge
Out of this comes Socrates’ most famous and most contested moral claim, intellectualism, which unfolds in three steps:
- Virtue is knowledge (arete = episteme): being just means knowing what justice is, as being a doctor means knowing medicine.
- No one does wrong willingly: whoever acts badly has mistaken for good something that is not. Evil is ignorance, not malice.
- Virtue can be taught, because it is a kind of knowledge. Hence the wrongdoer should be corrected, not merely punished.
The extreme consequence appears in the Lesser Hippias: someone who commits an injustice knowing what he is doing still possesses the knowledge, and on this scheme would come out “better” than someone who errs through ignorance. The paradox signals that something in the system does not add up.
The classic objection is Aristotle’s (Nicomachean Ethics VII): there is such a thing as akrasia, weakness of will. We constantly know what is good and do the opposite, because desire overrides judgement. By reducing moral action to knowledge alone, Socrates leaves no room for will or for the passions.
The daimonion
Socrates reports that since childhood he has been aware of a daimonion, an inner divine sign. It has one precise feature, stated explicitly in the Apology (31d): it intervenes only to hold him back, never to push him into action.
It was this personal sign, not traceable to the gods of the city, that his accusers used as evidence that he was introducing new divinities.
The trial and the death (399 BC)
In 399 BC three citizens bring the charge: Meletus, a poet, Anytus, an influential democratic politician, and Lycon, an orator. There are three counts: failing to recognise the gods of the city, introducing new divinities, and corrupting the young.
Behind the formal charges lies a political motive. Socrates’ circle had included Critias, leader of the Thirty Tyrants, and Alcibiades, the general who had betrayed Athens. The amnesty of 403 BC, however, made it impossible to prosecute anyone for the political events of those years, and a charge of impiety offered a legal way round it.
Before a jury of roughly 500 citizens chosen by lot, Socrates refuses the customary pleading tone and is found guilty by about 280 votes to 220. In the second phase, the timesis, prosecution and defence each propose a penalty and the jurors pick one: Meletus asks for death, Socrates replies that he deserves free meals at public expense in the Prytaneum, the honour given to Olympic victors, and only then falls back on a modest fine. The jury votes for death, by a wider margin than the guilty verdict.
The execution is postponed for a month while the sacred ship is away on its voyage to Delos. During that month his friend Crito arranges an escape and Socrates refuses it: in the Crito he imagines the Laws of Athens addressing him, reminding him that they gave him birth, education and seventy years of life under their protection. Escaping would break that agreement and answer one injustice with another. He drinks the hemlock.
After Socrates: the minor Socratic schools
His circle produced movements that each developed a different side of the master, often reaching opposite conclusions:
- The Cynics (Antisthenes, then Diogenes of Sinope) push self-sufficiency to its limit: virtue is enough for happiness, and everything else, wealth and convention included, is surplus.
- The Cyrenaics (Aristippus of Cyrene) read happiness as immediate pleasure, to be governed rather than submitted to.
- The Megarians (Euclides of Megara) develop the logical and dialectical side, identifying the Socratic Good with the Being of Parmenides.
And then Plato, who makes Socrates the protagonist of his own dialogues and founds the Academy. It is through him that the Socratic question reaches all later philosophy.
Common mistakes
- Confusing irony with sarcasm. Eironeia means dissimulation: Socrates does not mock, he pretends not to know so that the other person will speak.
- Crediting him with “know thyself”. The motto was carved on the temple of Apollo at Delphi long before him; Socrates adopts it, he does not coin it.
- Treating “I know that I know nothing” as scepticism. It is where inquiry starts, not where it ends: anyone who settles for not knowing stops looking.
- Merging the historical Socrates with the character in the mature dialogues. In the Republic and the Phaedo, Socrates presents Plato’s doctrines; only in the early dialogues is he close to the original.
- Saying the daimonion told him what to do. The Apology is explicit: it only ever holds him back.
- Confusing maieutics with teaching. Maieutics transmits no content: once the teacher supplies the answer, it is no longer maieutics.
- Saying he was condemned “for doing philosophy”, and unanimously. The formal charges were impiety and corrupting the young, and the margin was about 60 votes out of 500: 30 different jurors would have been enough.
Summary table
| Concept | Greek | What it is | Where it appears |
|---|---|---|---|
| Irony | eironeia | pretending not to know, so the interlocutor commits first | Apology, early dialogues |
| Refutation | elenchus | accepting the other’s claims and drawing contradictory consequences | Euthyphro, Laches |
| Aporia | aporia | the bafflement of someone who discovers he does not know | Meno 80a |
| Maieutics | maieutike techne | the art of delivering the other person’s own truth | Theaetetus 149a |
| Definition | ti esti | the answer to “what is it?”, valid for every case | Euthyphro, Laches |
| Virtue | arete | coincides with knowledge of the good | Protagoras, Meno |
| Divine sign | daimonion | an inner voice that holds him back from acting badly | Apology 31d |
The exercises below cover a true-or-false on the most commonly misread claims, matching the four sources, identifying the stages of the method, reconstructing the argument about the oracle, a full refutation of the definition of courage, the comparison with the Sophists, an analysis of Socratic intellectualism with Aristotle’s objection, and the vote count at the trial.
Solved exercises
1. True or false? Correct the false statements. a) Socrates wrote several dialogues that have been lost. b) The phrase 'know thyself' was coined by Socrates. c) According to the Apology, the daimonion told him what to do. d) Socrates charged fees like the Sophists. e) Aristotle credits Socrates with inductive arguments and the universal definition. base
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- a) False: Socrates wrote nothing at all. For him philosophy is a living conversation, and a written text cannot answer the person questioning it. This is the origin of the 'Socratic problem'.
- b) False: gnothi seauton was carved on the temple of Apollo at Delphi long before him. Socrates adopts it and turns it into a philosophical programme, but he does not invent it.
- c) False, and the correction matters: in the Apology (31d) the daimonion only intervenes negatively, to hold him back. It never tells him what to do.
- d) False: refusing payment is the most visible practical difference from the Sophists. Anyone who charges must guarantee a result, and therefore must sell certainties.
- e) True: this is the verdict of Metaphysics XIII 4. These are the two tools that lead from a collection of particular cases to a definition valid for all of them.
Answer: a) False; b) False; c) False (it restrains, it never prompts); d) False; e) True
2. Match each source with the picture of Socrates it hands down, and state the limitation of each. Sources: Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, Aristotle. Pictures: the comic-stage Sophist; the teacher of practical morality; the inventor of the universal definition; the inquirer who refutes without concluding. base
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- Plato → the inquirer who refutes without concluding. This is the figure of the early dialogues (Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, Laches), which almost always end in aporia.
- Limitation of Plato: in the mature dialogues, such as the Republic and the Phaedo, the character Socrates presents Plato's own doctrines. Only the early dialogues are considered close to the historical Socrates.
- Xenophon → the teacher of practical morality. In the Memorabilia he is a sensible man, useful to his friends and respectful of the gods.
- Limitation of Xenophon: he was not a philosopher, and he flattens the theoretical difficulties. A Socrates that reasonable does not explain why Athens put him to death.
- Aristophanes → the comic-stage Sophist. In the Clouds (423 BC) he speculates about things in the sky and teaches how to win an unjust case.
- Limitation of Aristophanes: it is a comic caricature, written twenty-four years before the trial. It is still useful evidence of how ordinary Athenians saw him.
- Aristotle → the inventor of the universal definition and of inductive reasoning. Limitation: he never met him, having been born in 384 BC, fifteen years after Socrates' death.
Answer: Plato → the inquirer who refutes without concluding (limitation: in the mature dialogues he speaks for Plato); Xenophon → the teacher of practical morality (limitation: flattens the theory); Aristophanes → the comic-stage Sophist (limitation: a caricature from 423 BC); Aristotle → the inventor of the universal definition (limitation: he never met him).
3. State whether each move belongs to the stage of irony and refutation, or to the stage of maieutics. 1) Socrates asks Euthyphro to teach him what holiness is, declaring himself ignorant. 2) He shows that the proposed definition contradicts a premise his interlocutor had already accepted. 3) He leaves the interlocutor in aporia, without supplying an answer. 4) He guides someone who has admitted ignorance with further questions, until that person formulates a better definition. 5) He says he practises his mother's trade as a midwife, but on souls. base
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- 1) Irony. The pretence of ignorance makes the other person speak first: whoever thinks they know is the one who has to state a thesis.
- 2) Refutation (elenchus), so still the first stage. Socrates does not oppose a rival thesis: he uses his interlocutor's own premises to produce the contradiction.
- 3) Irony, because aporia is its natural outcome. The negative result is not a failure: it is the clearing of the ground that has to come first.
- 4) Maieutics. Here the questions no longer demolish, they guide: the truth is not transmitted, it is brought out.
- 5) Maieutics. It is the image from the Theaetetus (149a): his mother Phaenarete delivered bodies, he delivers souls.
Answer: 1) irony; 2) irony-refutation; 3) irony (its outcome, aporia); 4) maieutics; 5) maieutics
4. The oracle at Delphi, consulted by his friend Chaerephon, replies that no one is wiser than Socrates. Yet Socrates is convinced he knows nothing. Reconstruct, step by step, how he escapes the contradiction, and explain why the investigation makes him so many enemies. intermedio
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- Set out the two premises: 1) the god cannot lie; 2) Socrates is convinced he knows nothing. Taken together they are contradictory.
- Socrates discards neither: he tests them. He goes looking for someone wiser than himself, in order to refute the oracle in practice.
- He questions the politicians: they believe they know what justice is, but two questions are enough to show they cannot define it.
- He questions the poets: they write beautiful things but cannot explain what those things mean. They produce by inspiration, not by knowledge.
- He questions the craftsmen: these really do know something, their trade. Precisely for that reason, though, they believe themselves competent about the most important matters too, and the error spreads.
- Conclusion: everyone knows less than they think. Socrates knows just as little, but he has no illusions about it. The difference lies not in the amount of knowledge but in awareness of one's own limit.
- The oracle was right, but in an unexpected sense: the wisest person is the one who knows the measure of his own ignorance.
- Every refutation, however, humiliates a citizen in public, often in front of his own followers. Inquiry by inquiry, Socrates builds up the hostility that in 399 BC will turn into a trial.
Answer: Socrates tests the oracle by questioning politicians, poets and craftsmen, and finds that all of them believe they know what they do not know. He concludes that the answer was true in an unexpected sense: the wisest person is not the one who knows most, but the one who knows that he does not know. The inquiry, though, exposes the city's leading men in public and earns him the hostility that leads to the trial of 399 BC.
5. The general Laches defines courage as 'staying at your post in battle and not running away'. Build the Socratic refutation in four moves and state what kind of answer Socrates is actually looking for. intermedio
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- Move 1, clarify the question: Socrates is not asking for an example of a courageous man, he is asking what courage is, that is, what is common to every case of courage.
- Move 2, find a counterexample: the Scythians fight while retreating, and at Plataea the Spartans broke ranks in order to counterattack. Were they cowards? No. So the definition excludes cases we do call courageous: it is too narrow.
- Move 3, widen the field: there is courage at sea as well, in illness, in poverty, in resisting pleasure and desire. A military definition covers only one species of the genus.
- Move 4, force a reformulation: Laches then proposes 'a certain endurance of the soul'. Socrates objects that foolish endurance is harmful, and what is harmful cannot be a virtue. The second definition falls too, this time for being too broad.
- Outcome: aporia. The positive conclusion is missing, but the gain is methodological: it is now clear that a definition must cover every case of courage and no case beyond it.
Answer: Socrates is looking for the universal definition (ti esti): not a list of examples, but the single feature present in every case of courage and absent from every case that is not courage. Laches' definition fails twice: the first version is too narrow, because it excludes tactical retreats and non-military courage; the second is too broad, because endurance can be foolish.
6. Assign each position to the Sophists or to Socrates, and identify the one point they actually share. 1) 'Man is the measure of all things.' 2) Charging money for teaching is legitimate. 3) Discussion should be short, by question and answer. 4) The purpose of argument is to persuade the audience. 5) There is a definition of the good that holds for everyone. 6) The object of philosophy is man, no longer nature. intermedio
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- 1) Sophists. It is Protagoras' formula: the criterion of truth and justice lies in the individual or in the individual city, and is therefore relative.
- 2) Sophists. They are professional educators and live by their teaching. Socrates refuses money precisely so that he does not have to guarantee a result.
- 3) Socrates. Brachylogy, short question-and-answer exchange, is the opposite of the Sophists' makrology, the long continuous speech: only the first lets you check every step.
- 4) Sophists. Speech is an instrument of persuasion, and its success is measured by the effect it produces, not by its truth.
- 5) Socrates. The search for a universal definition presupposes that the good does not vary from person to person.
- 6) Shared. With the Sophists philosophy moves from nature to man, and Socrates fully accepts that shift: they differ on method and outcome, not on the subject matter.
Answer: Sophists: 1, 2, 4. Socrates: 3, 5. Shared: 6, the shift of inquiry from nature to man. The decisive difference is that the Sophists stop at the relative and aim to persuade, while Socrates seeks a universal definition and aims to define.
7. Socratic intellectualism can be reduced to three linked claims. Reconstruct the chain, derive the paradox about deliberate wrongdoing, and explain the objection Aristotle raises against it. avanzato
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- Claim 1, virtue is knowledge (arete = episteme): being just means knowing what justice is, in the same way that being a doctor means knowing medicine.
- Claim 2, if knowing the good is enough to produce the good action, then no one does wrong willingly. Whoever does wrong has mistaken for good something that is not: evil is ignorance, not malice.
- Claim 3, if virtue is a kind of knowledge, then it can be taught, just as geometry is taught. The practical consequence is that moral education is possible and that the wrongdoer should be corrected, not merely punished.
- The paradox (Lesser Hippias): someone who does wrong knowing it is wrong still possesses the knowledge, while someone who errs through ignorance does not. On the Socratic scheme the first would come out 'better' than the second, which clashes with common sense.
- Aristotle's objection (Nicomachean Ethics VII) is akrasia, weakness of will: we constantly know perfectly well what is good and do the opposite, because desire overrides judgement.
- The weak point identified is precise: Socrates reduces moral action to knowledge alone and leaves no room for will and the passions, which in ordinary experience weigh as much as knowledge does.
Answer: The chain runs: virtue is knowledge → no one does wrong willingly, because wrongdoing comes from ignorance → virtue, being knowledge, can be taught. The paradox of the Lesser Hippias is that deliberate wrongdoing would make someone better than accidental wrongdoing, since at least the knowledge is there. Aristotle objects with akrasia: one can know the good and fail to do it, because knowledge alone does not move us to act.
8. In 399 BC a jury of 500 citizens tries Socrates. The first vote finds him guilty by roughly 280 votes to 220, and a tie results in acquittal. a) How many jurors would have had to change their vote for him to be acquitted, and what percentage of the jury is that? b) Why does the second vote make his position worse? c) On what grounds, in the Crito, does he refuse to escape? avanzato
Show solution
- a) Let x be the number of jurors who switch from 'guilty' to 'not guilty'. The votes become 280 − x on one side and 220 + x on the other.
- A tie is enough for acquittal, so set 280 − x = 220 + x, which gives 60 = 2x and therefore x = 30.
- Check: 280 − 30 = 250 and 220 + 30 = 250. A tie, hence acquittal. As a percentage, 30/500 = 0.06, that is 6% of the jury. This is exactly the calculation Socrates makes in the Apology (36a).
- b) The Athenian trial has a second phase, the timesis: prosecution and defence each propose a penalty and the jury picks one of the two, with no middle ground. Meletus asks for death.
- Socrates, instead of proposing exile or a substantial fine, argues that he deserves free meals in the Prytaneum at public expense, the honour reserved for Olympic victors; only afterwards does he fall back on a modest fine. The jury reads the counter-proposal as a provocation and votes for death by a wider margin than the guilty verdict.
- c) In the Crito Socrates imagines the Laws of Athens speaking to him: they gave him birth, education and seventy years of life under their protection, and by staying in the city he tacitly accepted an agreement.
- Escaping would break that agreement and with it the authority of the laws. Moreover one must never answer injustice with injustice: the wrong was done by a mistaken human verdict, not by the law as such.
Answer: a) 30 jurors, that is 6% of the jury: 280 − 30 = 250 = 220 + 30, and a tie acquits. b) Because in the timesis the jury chooses between two penalties only, and Socrates' counter-proposal of free meals in the Prytaneum sounds like a challenge: the death sentence passes with more votes than the guilty verdict. c) Through the speech of the Laws: escaping would break his agreement with the city and would mean answering one injustice with another.
FAQ
Why didn't Socrates write anything?
Because for him philosophy is a living conversation between people. A written text, as Plato later puts it in the Phaedrus, always repeats the same thing, cannot answer the person questioning it and cannot adapt to whoever is in front of it. That choice is the source of the 'Socratic problem': his thought has to be reconstructed entirely from other people's reports.
What does 'I know that I know nothing' actually mean?
It is not scepticism, and it is not a literal quotation either: in the Apology Socrates says something more precise, namely that what he does not know he does not believe he knows. It is the starting point of inquiry, not its conclusion: only someone who admits ignorance has a reason to search.
What is the difference between Socratic irony and maieutics?
They are two stages in sequence. Irony is the pretence of ignorance by which Socrates gets his interlocutor to speak and then demolishes his false certainty, ending in aporia. Maieutics comes afterwards: further questions help someone who has admitted ignorance to deliver a definition of his own. Without the first stage the second cannot even begin.
Why was Socrates sentenced to death?
The formal charges, brought by Meletus, Anytus and Lycon, were three: not recognising the gods of the city, introducing new divinities, and corrupting the young. Behind them lay a political motive: some of his associates, such as Critias and Alcibiades, were linked to the regime of the Thirty Tyrants, and the amnesty of 403 BC made it impossible to prosecute anyone openly on political grounds.
What was Socrates' daimonion?
An inner voice of divine origin which, according to the Apology (31d), only ever intervenes to hold him back when he is about to do something wrong: it never tells him what to do. It was precisely this personal sign that the prosecutors used as evidence that he was introducing new divinities.