The Socratic Method

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.

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stice and all it includes is actually a linguistically incorrect question. According to Logical Positivism, a major part of philosophy can be reduced to what is known as 'syntax.' It could then be a possibility that all philosophical problems are actually syntactical. And so, when errors in syntax are avoided, a philosophical problem is thereby either solved or demonstrated to be insoluble. 'Justice' is really an abstraction; therefore, Socrates could never arrive at a definitive answer concerning what it is. Perhaps deductive logic would take the argument to the greatest reaches possible; however, that would not be very far. Inductive logic would not serve at all in attempting to solve a question about an abstraction. Thus, all Socrates could do was resort to his Irony a play his dialectic games with his pupils. The Socratic Method is not a scientific method and leads only to inconclusive results. However, returning to Plato and his Theory of Ideas, Socrates was actually taking the position that knowledge is something that we remember after being prodded by questions-and-answers. Plato believed in absolutes. There is an absolute Form or Ideal with regard to such things as Beauty and Justice. For example, Absolute J
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Approximate Word count = 1485
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)