What is philosophy? Socrates and the examined life

Most of us hold our biggest beliefs, about what is real, what is right, and what a life is for, without ever having tested them. Philosophy is the discipline that tests them. The word comes from the Greek philosophia, "love of wisdom." In practice, philosophy is careful reasoning about the most basic questions, done by giving an argument: reasons laid out so that anyone can check whether the conclusion really follows (Perry et al., 2016).

This first lesson follows the person most responsible for turning that love of wisdom into a way of life: Socrates of Athens, a man who wrote nothing, questioned everyone, and was put to death for it in 399 BC.

The questions that measurement alone cannot answer. A lab can tell you how much of their memory people retain after a short night of sleep. The lab cannot tell you, by measuring, what counts as good evidence in the first place, whether you ought to keep a promise that costs you, or whether anything exists beyond the physical world. Those questions sit underneath every other field, including science itself.

Philosophers sort those questions into branches. Metaphysics asks what is real. Epistemology asks what knowledge is and how a person gets it. Logic studies which conclusions follow from which reasons. Ethics asks how a person should live and act. Figure 1.1 places those four beside political philosophy, aesthetics, and the philosophy of religion. Each later lesson in this course lives mostly in one or two of those branches.

Because a few thinkers began asking for explanations that anyone could examine. The Greek poets Homer and Hesiod explained storms and seasons through the moods of the gods. Around 585 BC, Thales of Miletus, a trading city on the coast of what is now Turkey, proposed instead that everything is ultimately made of water, and ancient writers credit him with predicting a solar eclipse (O'Grady, n.d.). The water answer is wrong. The move behind the water answer was new: a claim about all of nature, backed by reasons, open to challenge.

Thinkers before Socrates are called the Pre-Socratics. Heraclitus argued that everything is always changing. Parmenides argued the opposite, that change is an illusion. Those disagreements pushed philosophy forward, because each side had to give reasons. Figure 1.2 sets those thinkers on one line with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.

Only through other people, and they do not agree. Three writers knew Socrates personally. The playwright Aristophanes mocked him in a comedy, Clouds, as a fraud who taught students to win arguments dishonestly. The soldier and historian Xenophon remembered a practical moral advisor. Plato, his most brilliant student, wrote dialogues in which Socrates is the main speaker, and those dialogues are the Socrates most people know (Nails & Monoson, 2022).

Scholars call the puzzle of sorting the real Socrates from those portraits the Socratic problem. A common working rule: Plato's early dialogues, including the Euthyphro, the Apology, and the Crito, stay closest to the historical Socrates, while the later dialogues use Socrates as a voice for Plato's own theories. Lesson 3 takes up those later theories.

Because of a puzzle handed to him by the most famous religious site in Greece. In Plato's Apology, Socrates tells the jury that his friend Chaerephon traveled to the oracle at Delphi and asked whether anyone was wiser than Socrates. The priestess answered that no one was (Plato, 2002, Apology 21a).

Socrates says the answer baffled him, so he set out to test it. He questioned politicians, poets, and skilled craftsmen, people with a reputation for wisdom. Each one, he found, believed he knew important things he did not actually know. Socrates concluded that his own advantage was small but real:

This attitude is called intellectual humility: holding a belief only as firmly as the reasons for that belief allow. Notice what Socrates did not say. The famous line "I know that I know nothing" is a later paraphrase. His actual claim is narrower and more useful: do not think you know what you do not know.

By asking questions until a hidden problem surfaced. Scholars call his cross-examination the Socratic method (the Greek word is elenchus, "testing" or "refutation"). The method runs in a loop, shown in Figure 1.3:

• Ask for a definition of something the other person claims to understand, such as courage, justice, or piety.
• Test the definition against a case. A counterexample is a case that fits the definition but plainly is not the thing, or is the thing but does not fit.
• Expose the contradiction: the person cannot hold both the definition and his own judgment about the case.
• Revise and try again.

Many early dialogues end without a final definition, in aporia, a state of honest puzzlement. Aporia can feel like failure. Socrates treated aporia as progress: a person who knows he lacks an answer will finally start looking for one.

Plato's Euthyphro answers that question. Outside the courthouse where Socrates is about to face his own charges, he meets Euthyphro, a religious expert who is prosecuting his own father for the death of a laborer. Euthyphro is sure the prosecution is piety, the Greek virtue of doing right by the gods. So Socrates asks him what piety is (Plato, 2002).

Euthyphro's answers follow the loop in Figure 1.3:

The third definition leads to the Euthyphro dilemma, one of the most discussed questions in the history of ethics. If the gods love an act because the act is already pious, then piety has a nature of its own that the gods only recognize. If an act is pious only because the gods love it, then goodness seems to depend on whatever the gods happen to prefer. Figure 1.5 lays out both horns.

Euthyphro never answers. He suddenly remembers he has somewhere to be, and the dialogue ends in aporia. The question he walked away from has not gone away: anyone who says that morality comes from a divine source, and anyone who denies it, eventually has to face the Euthyphro dilemma. Later lessons take up the strongest replies on each side, including the medieval answer that goodness rests on the unchanging character of the one worshiped rather than on arbitrary preference or on a standard above him.

Partly because of what his questions had cost the city, and partly because of who had listened to them. In 399 BC, Athens had recently lost a 27-year war with Sparta, and for a year it had been ruled by a brutal pro-Spartan junta, the Thirty Tyrants. Critias, the junta's leader, and Alcibiades, a notorious traitor, had both spent time around Socrates (Nails & Monoson, 2022).

The formal charges were corrupting the young and not believing in the gods of the city while introducing new divine things (Plato, 2002, Apology 24b). A jury of about 500 citizens convicted him; Socrates remarks that a swing of only thirty votes would have acquitted him (Apology 36a). Asked to propose his own penalty, he suggested free meals for life at public expense, the honor given to Olympic champions. The jury sentenced him to death.

In the Crito, friends arrange his escape from prison. Socrates refuses: he argues that a man who has lived his whole life under the laws of Athens, and benefited from them, cannot break those laws the moment they turn against him. In the Phaedo, he drinks the hemlock calmly, surrounded by his friends. The painting at the top of this page shows that scene.

The practice of examining a life. At his trial he told the jury he would not stop questioning people even to save his life, and gave his reason:

An examined life, in Socrates' sense, is not a life spent in a library. An examined life is one in which a person knows why he believes what he believes, and is willing to change a belief when the reasons fail. It is worth noticing, too, that Socrates did not see his questioning as an attack on religion. He described it as a duty to the god of Delphi and spoke of a divine sign, his daimonion, that warned him away from wrong actions (Apology 23b, 31d). For Socrates, honest questioning and reverence belonged together. How faith and reason relate is one of the great questions of this course, and Lesson 5 begins it with Augustine's phrase "faith seeking understanding."

Four habits carry through the rest of this course, and through any hard conversation:

• Define your terms. Before arguing about whether an act is just or loving, say what you mean by just or loving.
• Hunt for counterexamples, starting with your own claims.
• Ask before you tell. A good question often moves a person further than a correction does.
• Welcome aporia. Finding out you do not know is the start of learning, not the end of it.