School · 490 BCE–300 BCE
Classical Greek philosophy
In fifth- and fourth-century Greek cities, public argument, Socratic examination, and competing schools made ethics, politics, knowledge, and education central philosophical concerns.
Shared questions
- What makes a person or city just, knowledgeable, and well ordered?
Internal disagreements
- Whether virtue is teachable, knowledge begins from definitions or experience, and civic convention can ground justice.
Key texts
- Republic — Plato's longest political dialogue is also the main source for the theory of forms and the tripartite soul.
- Nicomachean Ethics — The lecture course survives in a form compiled after Aristotle, and overlaps a second version, the Eudemian Ethics.
- Apology — Plato's account of Socrates' defence is a literary composition, not a transcript, which is part of the Socratic problem.