III.

Ideas

Although Socrates claimed only to know that he was ignorant, in arguments he developed a number of distinctive ethical views in the form of paradoxes. These included the ideas that virtue was knowledge; that no one does wrong willingly, but only out of ignorance; and that it is better to be wronged than to wrong someone else. These ideas, particularly the last, which bars retaliation, were quite foreign to the conventional public culture of Athens at the time. Socrates emphasized rational argument, concern with one’s soul, and the search for definitions of ethical ideas. As important as these ideas was his method of engaging in argument, which often involved an ironic stance towards the claims of his interlocutors, known as Socratic irony.

These concerns profoundly influenced the next generations of philosophers, however much they differed from one another. Socrates’s pupil, Plato, and Plato’s pupil, Aristotle, sought to extend Socratic dialogue while searching for the definitions Socrates never found and allowing for the irrational elements of the soul that he excluded. Antisthenes, a friend of Socrates, may have founded the Cynic school of philosophy, which taught life according to nature and not convention.

Another pupil of Socrates, Aristippus, founded the Cyrenaic philosophy of experience and pleasure, from which developed the philosophy of Epictetus. To such Stoics as the Roman philosopher Seneca the Elder and the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, Socrates appeared as the very embodiment of and guide to a life in accordance with wisdom rather than passion.