Where and When?
Socrates is one of the most famous names in philosophy and the one that civilians recognize. Many regions recognize Socrates from their own history. In the subcontinent, we pronounce Socrates as "sukraat".
Socrates lived in the city of Athens in Ancient Greece. He was born in 470 BC and passed away in 399 BC. He is, in some sense, the founder of Western Philosophy but ancient Greece had other philosophers before him. Socrates worked more on moral and ethical philosophy compared to his predecessors that worked on metaphysics.
Our chronological journey into philosophy starts with this famous ancient Greek philosopher.
The Socratic Problem
As it turns out, Socrates did not write any book himself. Most of what we know about him is through the works of his student Plato, his other student Xenophon, and Aristotle who was Plato's student. These accounts differ slightly. It is just a fun fact that Socrates has had an immeasurable impact on the world history even as far as the modern world because of the philosophy of his students, yet we do not really know the man himself.
The most reliable sources we have are Plato's dialogues on Socrates, which are a series of narrative essays on the various adventures of Socrates. Most of the dialogues are a must read which we will go over sometime in the future.
For context, think of Socrates as a moderate man, not fully abstaining from pleasures but wary of them. He was also indifferent to how he was perceived, fat, badly dressed, not the ideal hygiene, and not the prettiest to look at. He was affluent, critical of politics, wise, and in his youth he even served in several campaigns as a soldier.
The Socratic Method
The Socratic Method is the first epistemological method we are going to be looking at, epistemological meaning relating to the gathering or knowing of knowledge. So, how do you think Socrates thought knowledge could be developed and gathered if he was so averse to writing down his ideas? He talked. The Socratic Method is the process of conversation in an effort to get to the truth.
The idea is that in an honest conversation, knowledge reveals itself. The first person asks a question. The second answers. The first person identifies a weakness in the answer. The second updates the answer. The first person maybe finds another weakness, and the cycle repeats until the participants agree that they have covered all the holes and find a solution or consensus.
In practice, the Socratic Method requires someone to be the teacher in the conversation and the other is a learner. The teacher, instead of giving away the knowledge in a lecture, asks questions such that the learner can generate answers on their own. If they start barking up the wrong tree, the teacher guides them back on to the right path.
Flipped Classrooms
The Socratic Method is practiced after a rebrand in what we call flipped classrooms. In some courses that are less technical and rely more on case studies, such as business classes, legal courses, and philosophy, we can have flipped classrooms. Teachers have assigned reading materials to the class that has to be completed before the class.
During the class, the teacher simply throws in questions and allows the class to participate in a Socratic Dialogue. The teacher maybe divides the students into various groups. The teacher then makes an exploratory statement. Someone responds with an idea, the next identifies any weaknesses, someone improves it and the cycle improves until the teacher is satisfied that the class has reached the 'correct' conclusions.
However, there is room here that some new perspective might surprise even the teacher because new ideas are introduced to the world every day.
Usefulness of the Socratic Method
Personally, the Socratic Method is the best epistemological method, provided you have the required resources, time and a good bouncing board.
Firstly, this method is slow because you are meant to waste time when you hit dead ends in your understanding. If you were spoon-fed the information or just read a conclusion, that method would be faster and efficient.
Secondly, you need someone to bounce ideas around with and that person should at least be at par with you, preferably more advanced. Where do you get someone smart enough to analyze your ideas, quick enough to respond to them, and wise enough to see the bigger picture of the conversation and also you can compensate for their time. Socrates interacted with the public as a teacher. Flipped classrooms have paid teachers, but a normal person will not necessarily have access to similar company.
There is a separate argument here that the role of the elderly is to be Socratic teachers to their children and grandchildren. We support our elders and in turn, they are the bedrock of our epistemological method.
Thus, if you have these two resources, time and a person, there is nothing better. Again, this is not the most efficient method. If you want to learn how to file taxes, how to make a website, or how to convert kilometers per hour to meters per second, nobody should recommend you the Socratic Method. Instead, you would need something focused, which is going to be a few key taps away in the form of a tutorial or a standard lesson on how to do something.
However, if your goal is to learn to think, maybe you want to do philosophy as a hobby, maybe you need to exercise your mind because it is useful for your profession as a business analyst or a lawyer, you should choose the Socratic Method. You would need a teacher-type figure to give you questions, analyze your answers and nudges you in the right direction with some feedback.
Coming back to rationalism and empiricism, the Socratic Method does not care which box you fit in. Maybe as a rationalist, your teacher will point out the logical contradiction in your answer, which is the case with Socrates' dialogues. Maybe as an empiricist, your teacher will point to a case study whose result clashes with your hypothesis. The Socratic Method accepts both worldviews.
The Social Aspect of Learning
An important part of philosophy is the constant feedback between philosophers. All of the philosophers we will explore in this course will have dialogues and conversations with each other, learning from each other, and figuring out the flaws in each other's works. There are entire books written as responses to others. One philosopher makes a claim and that inspires the other to expand on the idea or to rebuke it.
However, most of the times this conversation and feedback is not face to face. Maybe there was a lot of conversation but most of the historical record is only the written discourse, we do not know. There are many practical reasons for this. Many of the philosophers were eccentric, introverted, and situated far away, two major philosophers working out their ideas over a hot chocolate in a café in Rome in the 18th century was rare. Moreover, sometimes these philosophers were separated by time of a few decades or even centuries.
The key point of the Socratic Method is not the process of feedback. It is not a slow conversation in the form of letters. Instead, it is a dynamic process where you are placed in an environment where you are forced to show your thinking process. Because the Socratic Method is not just about coming to the right conclusions. You should not just get lucky and stumble your way into the right answer. If the goal of education was only to get to the right conclusion, then the teacher should just give you the answer. Instead the hidden purpose of Socratic Method and education is general is to learn how to think. This process of feedback, which requires you to show your work in real time, and react to the feedback, teaches you how to think.
Socrates was loyal to a fault
We will get to know more about Socrates later when we specifically go into Plato's dialogue to have a detailed look. For now, an important story from Socrates' life deserves mention here. As far as we understand, this is the first well-documented example of such an incident.
Socrates would often get into trouble with the ruling class of Athens because he was vocal about all authoritarian practices of the ruling class. He was a fan of justice, ethics, and morality. He suffered in his practice of moderation, his practice of walking barefoot, and had the panache to say no to the ruling elite when they asked him to be a part of anything that clashed with his personal creed.
Long story short, Socrates was convicted, charged with impiety (not believing in the city's gods) and corrupting the youth through his teachings. Socrates did not have a school but for multiple decades, he philosophized actively in Athens through public and private discussions and debates in which he condoned the ruling elite.
In his case before a court, Socrates refused to plead guilty by confession, which would protect him and appease the ruling class. Instead, he tried to defend himself as found in the dialogue "Apology". Then when he was wrongly convicted, he was offered the option of exile. At this point, exile was the common way ancient Greece city states dealt with problems. Practical people would choose to pack up and try their luck somewhere else.
Both Aristotle and Anaximander chose exile when it was their time.
However, Socrates said no to exile, and instead accepted the Athenian traditional punishment of drinking poison. Then the day before his execution, his friends prepared an escape plan for him from prison, and he refused them even when everything was ready. The next day, his sentence was carried out.
To be fair, Socrates was around 71 years old at the point he decided to take poison as the punishment. We all know older family members who are significantly more stubborn. It would have been more heart breaking if Socrates was a young man dying for his beliefs, but the facts do not change. Socrates chose to die while respecting the laws of his city instead of fleeing which betrayed the city or confessing for appeasement, which betrayed his own sense of self. Instead, he chose to remain loyal to a fault.
Idealists like Socrates, in the social sense and not in the metaphysical sense, continued to die for what they believed in public deaths. Savonarola, Thomas More, and Joan of Arc are some of the examples at the top of my head who followed a similar path to the grave. Thousands of brave souls stand in the face of tyranny and choose to stand firm and loyal to their sense of self and pay the price of suffering and sometimes even death.
Socrates did not start the trend of academics dying for what they believe, but at the same time, the corollaries to draw are disappointing. First corollary is that just because you do accept death, does not mean it will change anything. Very rarely will you be immortalized in history. The second corollary is that the dynamic of tyranny has not changed since written history where true power lies in power, and not those with knowledge.
Conclusion
Socrates was a wise old man who liked to teach and philosophize through live discourses and dialogues, which we can use to make philosophy and learning more social as well as reducing the spoon-feeding aspects of it.
What is the dialectic method?
Before I leave you, let me give you a cursory look at the jargon Dialectic Method. Firstly, the Socratic Method is a specific type of Dialectic Method. The Dialectic Method specifically is concerned with dialogues and discourses where two people are holding different points of views but are willing to arrive at the truth through reasoned argumentation.
If such an argumentation is structured with a teacher instead of two equals, it takes the form of the Socratic Method. However, say two peers are just bouncing back and forth claims and counter-claims; that is, broadly speaking, the Dialectic Method. Dialectic means the art of investigating or discussing the truth of opinions in general.
Over the course of history, some terms have become part of the dialectic method, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. It is the broader idea that in most circumstances, the truth is always in the middle. The first person makes a claim about the reality of the world. That is a thesis. The other person finds a metaphysical contradiction in the first and instead fires a new claim of their own. That would be the anti-thesis, which might also have different metaphysical contradictions. Through reasoned argumentation, the two people should be able to find a middle ground that resolves the contradictions in both the thesis and the antithesis. This middle ground is called synthesis.
Now, onto Plato.