Socratic School of Ancient Greek Philosophy Texts

The Socratic method is a way of doing philosophy practised by Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) in Athens. It was never a school with members and a head, but a practice of dialogue, known to us almost entirely through the written dialogues of his student Plato.

The method works as a cooperative exchange in which one participant questions another in order to examine his beliefs. Beginning from a common opinion or proposed definition, the questioner draws out its consequences through agreed premises until the interlocutor's original claim conflicts with his other commitments. This refutation, the ἔλεγχος, either drives the search toward a better account or leaves the interlocutor acknowledging that he does not know what he assumed he did. Socrates described his own part in the exchange with the image of the midwife (μαιευτικός): he claimed to help others give birth to ideas already within them, imparting no doctrines of his own.

The method is most telling on subjects where people hold deep but unexamined convictions, above all on how one should live. Its demand is that a person give an account of himself, of his beliefs and actions and the grounds for them.

After Socrates' death in 399 BCE the method passed into the tradition through Plato's dialogues rather than through any institution. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) later objected that, because the ἔλεγχος argues from premises the interlocutor happens to accept rather than from what is evident in itself, it cannot yield secure knowledge, and he set against it the syllogistic method of demonstration. The objection marked a lasting division in the practice of philosophy, yet dialectical questioning in the Socratic manner remained a standing instrument of philosophy and of education thereafter.