Socrates (470-399 BCE) was an Athenian philosopher who questioned the moral and political values of his time through dialectic discussions. He believed that an examined interior life focused on virtue, truth, and wisdom was more important than wealth, fame or power. Accused of corrupting the youth of Athens, Socrates refused to escape his death sentence through hemlock poisoning, remaining committed to his philosophical ideals. His influence shaped later philosophers like Plato, as he pioneered inductive reasoning and the Socratic method of questioning beliefs.

1. Socrates (470 – 399 BCE)

2. The Stars Group members
Student Name Student Number
1 Khadija Mohamed 079197
2 Entone Wesonga 079033
3 Sarah Kariuki 018301
4 Kioko Muia 079163
5 Arnold Mburu 061255
6 Mary Wanjiku 061732
7 Caxton Musyimi 056004

3. Introduction
 He lived (469-399)the Golden Age of Athens.
 Father, a sculptor and stone-mason. His mother was a midwife.
 He was a stone cutter in his adult hood & served in the army
 Spent most of his time in the marketplace discussing all sorts of things
 The Oracle at Delphi labeled him “The wisest man in Athens”
 Socrates did not believe he was wise, so he set out to prove the
oracle wrong
 “There must be someone wiser than I, since I am not wise at all”

4.  Most of the men he questioned were Sophists, wealthy men whose
profession was to teach aristocratic young men how to be
successful
 According to the Sophists, success was the ability to gain and hold
onto
 Wealth
 Fame
 Power
 Socrates believed that the Sophists were wrong
 Wealth, fame, and power are not important
 What matters most in life is our moral goodness
 In order to be morally good, we need to think and re-evaluate our
moral values

5. The Death of Socrates
 Eventually Socrates got in trouble with the wealthy,
famous, powerful forces in Athens
 He was accused of two crimes – lacking respect for the
city’s gods and of poisoning the young men’s minds
 Questioning values was the crime; the penalty was
death.
 He was found guilty of the crimes
 He participated in his own execution by drinking poison
called Hemlock.

6. The Death of Socrates
David, 1786

7. Main influence from other philosophers
 Socrates as a philosopher had influences on the
earlier part of his life when he was a student of
Anaxagoras. But Socrates left inquiries into the
physical world for a dedicated investigation of
the development of moral character.
 This is when he started developing his dialectic
method of inquisition.

8. Socrates’ main works
 Socrates did not write anything.
 Everything we know about him was written by
others
 He pursued values in conversation with others –
Goodness, Justice, Truth, Self-Knowledge
 He criticized the self-satisfied Sophists because
they claimed to possess the final answers to all
questions – wealth, fame, power

9. Socrates’ main works….cont’d
 Founder of Socratic Method-involving solving a problem by breaking
it down into a series of questions, the answers to which gradually
distill the answer a person would seek.
 Socrates was an awakened thinker that questioned the moral and
political aspects of Athens and found flaws.
 He pioneered the use of inductive reasoning which is to make
conclusions hence founder of Socratic method.
 He showed the world the meaning of commitment; he could have
escaped the death sentence but went through with it because it
doesn’t cope with his philosophy which was to question

10.  Our interior life – our “psyche” or “soul” –
is the most important part of life
 Our psyche is “healthy” when it seeks
goodness, truth, justice, and self-
knowledge
 A soul in search of wealth, fame, and
power becomes weak, sickly, ignorant

11.  “THE UNEXAMINED LIFE IS NOT WORTH
LIVING”
 If we spend our lives examining and criticizing
ourselves, our psyches become strong
 In seeking goodness, justice, truth and self-
knowledge, we will not become self-satisfied,
bigoted, and ignorant
 We may not find what we seek, but the life we
live will be one that strengthens our inner selves

12. Cosmology of Socrates
 Socrates believed in the presence of one God
unlike the pre-Socratic philosophers before him.
 He focused mainly on ethics and what was right
and just.
 Socrates sought for rational basis for ethics and
morality for practice of good or bad, right or
wrong.
 Later Plato proposed that universe is a product
of rational, purposive and beneficent agency.

13. morality
 The ultimate aim of Socrates'
philosophical method was always ethical.
 Thus all wrong doing was due to
ignorance
 Socrates could never accept what
Aristotle called “morale weakness” (know
what was good and yet still do evil)

14. Political Views of Socrates
 Socrates’ political views, as represented in Plato's dialogue "The
Republic", were strongly against the democracy that had so recently
been restored in the Athens of his day, and indeed against any form of
government that did not conform to his ideal of a perfect republic led by
philosophers.
 It is argued that Socrates believed "ideals belong in a world only the wise
man can understand", making the philosopher the only type of person
suitable to govern others.
 He believed that the will of the majority was not necessarily a good
method of decision-making, but that it was much more important that
decisions be logical and defensible.
 In Plato's "early" dialogue, "Apology of Socrates" Socrates refused to
enter politics because he could not tell other people how to lead their lives
when he didn't know how to live his own. He thought he was a philosopher
of truth, which he had not fully discovered.

15. References
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates
 http://www.2020site.org/socrates
 WWW.philosophypages.com/hy
 1. Socrates Legacy,
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates
 2. Socrates and His followers,
http://www.iep.utm.edu/greekphi/#H2
 3.LaterHistorical Influences,
http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2d.htm
 4. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy

16. Thank You
 End Of Presentation
 Any Questions????