Socrates
A man who wrote nothing and claimed to know nothing changes philosophy permanently.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 71 years
- Known to
- ± 5 years
- Era
- Classical, Holocene
Socrates spends his life in the Athenian agora asking people to define what they claim to know — justice, courage, piety — and demonstrating that they cannot. He writes nothing; we have him through Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes, who disagree. In 399 BCE he is tried for impiety and corrupting the young and executed by hemlock, having declined to escape. The method of relentless questioning, and the idea that the unexamined life is not worth living, are his.