Socrates

Socrates: A Very Short Introduction

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SOCRATES

A Very Short Introduction

C. C. W. Taylor

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford
OX
2 6
DP

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Published in the United States
by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

© C. C. W. Taylor 1998

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First published 1998
First published as a Very Short Introduction 2000

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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Data available
ISBN 0–19–285412–7

7 9 10 8 6

Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

1 Introduction

2 Life

3 Socratic Literature and the Socratic Problem

4 Plato’s Socrates

5 Socrates and Later Philosophy

6 Conclusion

References

Further Reading

Index of Ancient Works Cited

General Index

List of Illustrations

1 Bust of Socrates – a Roman copy of an original made shortly after Socrates’ death

Courtesy of Hulton Getty

2 A comical representation of Socrates with his ‘two wives’ by the 17th-century Dutch painter Caesar Boethius van Everdingen (1606–78)

Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg/photo AKG London

3 The Pnyx, the meeting-place of the Athenian assembly: a view from the Observatory

Courtesy of the Alison Frantz Collection, American School of Classical Studies at Athens

4 Remains of the Royal Stoa or
Stoa Basileios
, the headquarters of the King Archon

© Janice Seigel

5 Small containers thought to have contained poison for executions

Courtesy of the Agora Museum, Athens

6 The Death of Socrates.
Crito Closing the Eyes of the Dead Socrates
(1787–92) by Antonio Canova

© Mimmo Jodice/Corbis

7 A depiction of Alcibiades being reprimanded by Socrates (Italian school,
c
.1780).

Courtesy of Charles Plante Fine Arts/Bridgeman Art Library

8 A detail from Raphael’s
The School of Athens
(1508–11), which portrays the most famous thinkers of ancient Greece

Courtesy of the Vatican Museums

9 Frontispiece drawn by Matthew Paris of St Albans (d. 1259) for a fortune-telling tract,
The Prognostics of Socrates the King

Courtesy of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, MS Ashm. 304, fol. 31v (detail)

The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.

Acknowledgements

Anyone who writes on Socrates must acknowledge his or her indebtedness to the very large amount of scholarly work on that philosopher, most of it written in the later part of the twentieth century, and much of it of the highest quality. We are all part of a continuing tradition. Details of some of the most significant modern work on Socrates are given in the section on Further Reading at the end of this book.

In addition to this general indebtedness, certain portions of this book borrow heavily from specific writings by others. The first section in
Chapter 2
, ‘Authors other than Plato’, relies particularly on D. Clay, ‘The Origins of the Socratic Dialogue’, in P. A. Vander Waerdt (ed.),
The Socratic Movement
(Ithaca, NY and London, 1994) and on C. H. Kahn,
Plato and the Socratic Dialogue
(Cambridge, 1996),
ch. 1
.
Chapter 5
, ‘Socrates and Later Philosophy’, relies on a number of authors: in the section on ‘Ancient Philosophy’ I am indebted above all to A. A. Long, ‘Socrates in Hellenistic Philosophy’,
Classical Quarterly
, 38 (1988), 150–71, and also to contributions to Vander Waerdt’s
The Socratic Movement
by G. Striker, J. G. DeFillipo and P. T. Mitsis, J. Annas, and V. T. McKirahan. (Details of those articles may be found in that volume.) The section ‘Medieval and Modern Philosophy’ is based in part on P. J. Fitzpatrick, ‘The Legacy of Socrates’, in B. S. Gower and M. C. Stokes (eds.),
Socratic Questions
(London and New York, 1992).

Abbreviations