Socrates, "The Republic"

470 BC-399 BC

Indefatigable search of Greek philosopher Socrates for ethical knowledge challenged conventional mores and led to his trial and execution on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth; although he wrote nothing, the dialogues of Plato, his greatest pupil, capture his method of question and answer.

People consider this inscrutable individual enigma in his lifetime of the handful who forever changed conception of thought. They vigorously dispute most of our second-hand information, but his mythic death at the hands of the democracy nevertheless founded the academic discipline, and he influenced in every age. Because they widely consider his paradigmatic life more generally, the admiration and emulation, normally reserved for Jesus or Buddha, founders of religious sects, strangely encumbered Socrates, who, convicted on irreverence toward the gods, tried so hard to make other persons to think on their own. Many other persons found him so certainly impressive despite his strange appearance, personality, behavior, and views.

People generally refer to the whole contested issue, the so thorny difficulty of distinguishing the historical person from his image in the authors of the texts and moreover scores of later interpreters, as the Socratic problem. Each age, each intellectual turn, produces an image of its own. No less true now that, “The ‘real’ Socrates we have not: what we have is a set of interpretations each of which represents a ‘theoretically possible’ Socrates,” as Cornelia de Vogel put. In fact, model of Gregory Vlastos, a new standard analytic paradigm for interpreting Socrates, held sway until the mid 1990s. Socrates, the figure, really fundamentally dominates any virtually any interpretation.