The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the Socratic Method. Socrates usually never really arrives at a definite answer to such questions as: "What is Justice?" The situation is always left on an ambiguous note.
Socrates was born in 469 B.C. in the city of Athens.
According to his epistemology, a person's knowledge is innate. The answers already exist in the individual's mind; and so, it is only necessary to draw out this knowledge by the question and answer approach. This procedure is known as 'The Socratic Method.' J. E. Raven suggests: "First and most obvious, Socrates is always at this stage a central figure. Invariably, with his well-known irony and professions of ignorance, he sets about the merciless exposure of the self-satisfied blindness of the alleged expert, the politician, the general, the priest or the poet. There is a constant reference to the craftsman, who, knowing what he wants to do or make, and how to set about his task in accordance with a clearly preconceived plan, provides an example of the kind of knowledge which the alleged expert should but does not possess. Socrates is constantly represented as doing what Aristotle in the Metaphysics tells us that he did, namely using inductive arguments in the search for universal definitions. Yet these definitions are never forthcoming" (Raven 35-36). Socrates approached his arguments as if he had no real knowledge of the answers, and this is a part of his irony.
The Socratic Method, in argument or explanation, is the employment of the question-and-answer approach, such as Socrates uses in Plato's Dialogues. In this procedure, Socrates feigned ignorance of the subject at hand and then attempted to strengthen his point by the question-and-answer method. He always described himself as a 'gad-fly,' who aroused people into thought and arriving at their own conclusions to a problem. Socrates claimed he really was an ignorant person. The met...