Socrates questions Athens

Socrates wrote nothing; he walked and talked, pressing Athenians to define justice, courage and the good — and died for refusing to stop.

Why it matters

The examined life became philosophy's founding posture: know that you do not know, follow the argument wherever it goes. Every later dialogic tradition inherits his method.

People

Socrates

Related events

• 387 BCE – 86 BCE

  Plato founds the Academy

  Plato's school outside Athens — 'let no one ignorant of geometry enter' — pursued definitions, mathematics and the theory of Forms for centuries.

  Philosophy · europe

• 431 BCE – 404 BCE

  The Peloponnesian war destroys the Greek balance

  Twenty-seven years of war between Athens and Sparta exhausted the classical Greek world; Thucydides chronicled it as a study of power, fear and miscalculation.

  Wars & conflicts · europe

• 384 BCE – 322 BCE

  Aristotle classifies the world

  Aristotle systematized logic, biology, ethics, politics and poetics — the first person to organize knowledge into fields and investigate them empirically.

  Philosophy · europe

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Socrates