Socrates made ethical examination a public practice, testing claims to knowledge through questioning and insisting that care of the soul matters more than status or unreflective success.
Intellectual setting
He left no writings; Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes, and later sources offer sharply different portraits shaped by their own aims.
Key ideas
Elenchus
Questioning exposes tensions among a speaker's commitments and turns confidence into a shared investigation.
Care of the soul
Ethical improvement requires examining justice, courage, piety, and the good rather than pursuing reputation alone.
Legacy
Socrates became the defining reference for later Greek ethics and for competing accounts of philosophy as examination, dialogue, and way of life.
Scholarly notes
The Socratic problem · contested
Everything known about Socrates comes from writers with something to prove — Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle — and reconstructing the original behind their portraits is treated as an impossible task; what the sources leave is a composite picture, and which parts of it are historical is still argued.