Did Socrates Exist?
Actually he did and we know he was in fact an actual historical person with a high degree of certainty.
The evidence for Socrates
The real Socrates, if there was one, was born in Athens around 470 BCE, lived in that city almost his entire life, acquired a reputation as a philosopher, and was executed by the city government when he was about 70 years old. Many other details about his life are probably true if that much is true, but the question of his historicity will be settled if we have strong evidence for a man by that name having lived at that time, acquired such a reputation, and died in that manner.
Socrates is mentioned in documents written by three people who were alive during his purported lifetime. Whether the three writers worked independently of one another cannot be known with certainty. On the face of things, it is not obvious that any of them influenced the others, but it is hardly inconceivable that they could have. Socrates appears as a character in at least two of Aristophanes' plays. He appears as an interlocutor in a substantial portion of Plato's writings, and he plays a similar role in some of Xenophon's work.[2] Xenophon's material is similar to some of Plato's but not entirely consistent.
Aristophanes' work is clearly satirical, not biographical. From the play itself, we cannot know whether he was making fun of a real philosopher known to his audience or ridiculing certain ideas that were much discussed at the time and using a fictional character to embody them. The former does seem prima facie more likely, but the latter cannot yet be ruled out.
Aristophanes produced his plays while Socrates (if he existed) was still alive. Plato and Xenophon did their work after his purported death, both of them including Socrates' defense against the charges that led to his execution. Both writers give the impression that they had known Socrates and studied under his tutelage.
These writers are our best evidence for Socrates' historicity. If they do not suffice to overcome reasonable doubt, then no other documents in which he is mentioned can make up for their lack.
We are not concerned here with the accuracy of any particular detail in any of the documents. Plato's dialogues are certainly not transcriptions of actual conversations between Socrates and other people. The occasional autobiographical comment attributed to Socrates might or might not be factual. The modern historical consensus is that, especially in the later dialogues, the Socrates character is speaking Plato's mind more than Socrates' own. But we're asking whether the man was real, never minding for the moment how accurately Plato and the others portrayed him.
A writer who falsely portrays a certain individual existing in a certain place at a certain time may have one of three mind sets. He might think his portrayal is truthful and want his readers to believe it. In that case his writing is simply erroneous. He might know his portrayal is not truthful but want his readers to believe it anyway. In that case his writing is fraudulent. He might know his portrayal is not truthful but not expect his readers to think otherwise. In that case his writing is fictional.
We're probably safe in dismissing as absurd the possibility that all three of these writers made a mistake. They were not passing on legends or oral traditions. They were writing of a man who achieved fame and was executed in their lifetime. They could have misquoted him. They could have been mistaken about a lot of things. It is unlikely they could all have made a mistake about his existence.
There is no apparent motive for fraud and no way it could have succeeded. The documents were produced in Athens for Athenian readers. Those readers would have known whether Aristophanes's Socrates was parodying any real philosopher. They would have known whether Plato and Xenophon were writing about any execution that had really occurred within living memory. Barely a generation after Plato wrote the Apology, though, Athenians were talking as if they took Socrates' historicity for granted. Aristotle, a pupil of Plato, made straightforward references to him. There is also a reference to Socrates' execution and the reasons for it in a speech attributed to an orator called Aechines less than half a century after the event.
For about the same reason, it is improbable that Socrates was simply a fiction. People can believe and have believed in the historicity of fictional characters even when the characters' creators did not intend such. The setting has to be somewhat removed from the readers' own lives, though. Athenian trials were very public, and their juries had 500 members. If Socrates was not real and Plato expected his readers to know he was not real, he had good reason. Athenians would indeed have known that their city had not actually executed any famous philosophers within recent memory. (The same reasoning could be used against the error hypothesis if it were not already so implausible.)
The most parsimonious accounting of the evidence, then, says that Plato and the others were writing about a real man who really was executed, and that his name was Socrates.
That is, unless some fact not yet mentioned is inconsistent with this accounting. Socrates is supposed to have been executed in the year 399 BCE. There was presumably an official record of the proceedings. It has not been found, but neither have any other of the city's records from that period. If we did have those records and had reason to believe they were complete, but they did not mention Socrates, then his historicity would be more questionable. Another example of negative evidence would be a contemporary document in which the author criticized people for thinking Socrates was real. It would not prove his nonexistence, but we would have to explain why, if Socrates was real, anybody living at that time might have thought otherwise.
We can still ask how we know that the documents attributed to Plato and the others were actually written by those people. If they are not authentic, then the case for Socrates' historicity will be greatly weakened.
I have not had an opportunity yet to research the evidence for the authenticity of Plato's dialogues or the works attributed to other famous Greeks of his era. For the time being, I note only the apparently unanimous consensus of professional historians and assume that there is a good reason for such a consensus. In a future article, we can use Plato as an example -- but make no mistake in suggesting that Socrates' historical existence is necessarily any easier to prove than Plato.
Generally speaking, I do not believe in conspiracies. There is potentially big money to be made in challenging academic orthodoxies. Heretics don't even need strong evidence or good arguments. All they need is a hint of evidence and some arguments that sound good to people who enjoy believing that the experts don't really know anything.
There are a handful of scholars who have challenged Socrates' historicity, advocating the fiction hypothesis, but nobody to my knowledge doubts that Plato's dialogues were written by a philosopher named Plato who lived in Athens during and after the time that Socrates would have lived there if he had been real. Nor does anyone seem to doubt that the works attributed to Aristotle were written by a philosopher named Aristotle who was a student of Plato.
That nobody questions these things does not mean they must be true. The question is whether we laymen are justified in believing them on the grounds that no expert doubts them. Absent compelling evidence that the experts have made a mistake, the answer is that we are justified in a tentative assumption that they know what they're talking about. The emphasis must be on tentative, though. We are never justified in supposing that the experts are infallible. If we have evidence against the authorities, we are justified in doubting the authorities. But we do need that evidence.
Worth noting is the documentation on people referencing Socrates' existence. For example, Xenophon is known to history as the leader of the first Greek military expedition into Persia. He later wrote a book about the expedition (sometimes called "The March of the Ten Thousand"
. The witnesses for Jesus, i.e. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, aren't known to history with any more certainty than Jesus is.
To summarize: We have apparently primary sources for Socrates. We have contemporaneous accounts of his existence. We have documents whose existence is not easily explained except on the supposition that Socrates was a real person. It is strong evidence for a historical Socrates.
http://www.freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Socrates_vs_Jesus
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