The Examined Life, the Gadfly of Athens & the Philosophical Revolution
"The unexamined life is not worth living."
— Apology 38a470–399 BCE · Athens
Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) was an Athenian stonemason's son who became the foundational figure of Western philosophy — a thinker who, paradoxically, wrote nothing. Everything we know of him arrives through the accounts of others, principally Plato, Xenophon, and the comic poet Aristophanes, each constructing a different Socrates for different purposes.
Physically described as ugly — snub-nosed, bulging-eyed, ungainly — Socrates haunted the agora, the gymnasiums, and the homes of wealthy Athenians, engaging all comers in relentless questioning. His vocation was not the teaching of a doctrine but the practice of examination itself: eliciting assumptions, exposing contradictions, and driving interlocutors toward the recognition of their own ignorance.
His father Sophroniscus was a sculptor; his mother Phaenarete a midwife — a fact Socrates exploited philosophically, describing his own method as maieutic, the art of intellectual midwifery: not implanting knowledge but drawing it out from those who already carry it within them.
Born c. 470 BCE in Alopeke, Attica. Served with distinction as a hoplite at Potidaea (432), Delium (424), and Amphipolis (422). Married Xanthippe; possibly a second wife Myrto. Three sons. Tried and executed by hemlock in 399 BCE, aged approximately 70.
After the Oracle at Delphi reportedly told his friend Chaerephon that no one was wiser than Socrates, he set about testing the claim — questioning politicians, poets, and craftsmen. His conclusion: they claimed knowledge they did not possess; he at least knew that he did not know.
Socrates lived through Athens' golden age under Pericles, the catastrophic Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), the reign of the Thirty Tyrants, and the restored democracy that eventually condemned him. Philosophy was not remote from politics; it was dangerously entangled with it.
The elenchus (Greek: ἔλεγχος, "refutation" or "cross-examination") is Socrates' signature philosophical procedure. He invites an interlocutor to define a virtue or concept — piety, justice, courage, knowledge — then subjects the definition to a series of counter-examples and logical challenges until the definition collapses. The aim is not victory but aporia: productive perplexity.
The elenchus operates through genuine dialectic — not sophistic rhetoric. It requires good faith: Socrates insists interlocutors say only what they actually believe.
This famous phrase is actually a later paraphrase; the Apology is subtler. Socrates claims a specific and superior form of ignorance: unlike politicians, poets, and craftsmen, who mistake competence in one domain for wisdom about everything, Socrates knows that his apparent knowledge does not amount to genuine understanding. This "second-order" self-knowledge — knowing the boundaries of one's knowledge — is itself a form of philosophical wisdom.
The Delphic Oracle's verdict that no one is wiser than Socrates presents a paradox: he believes himself ignorant, yet the god declares him wisest. His resolution is that true wisdom begins with recognising what one does not know. The craftsmen know their craft but extrapolate beyond it; Socrates does not. That limited, honest self-appraisal is what the oracle means by wisdom.
Socrates draws a pointed distinction between anthropine sophia (human wisdom) and the perfect knowledge that belongs to the gods. Human wisdom is at best "worth little or nothing" — yet it is still far better than the pretense of knowledge. Philosophy does not culminate in certainty; it cultivates a disciplined relationship to uncertainty, holding open what must remain open.
Socratic ignorance is not scepticism or relativism — Socrates passionately believes virtue matters and that good and bad are real. What he denies is possessing a systematic account of virtue adequate to ground moral action. The examined life is not a life of conclusions but a perpetual inquiry. To stop inquiring, to rest satisfied with received opinion, is the philosophical failure he most deplores.
"I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance."
— Attributed (paraphrase of Apology 21d)Socrates' most radical ethical claim: virtue (aretē) is a form of knowledge, and wrongdoing is always a form of ignorance. No one does wrong willingly — those who act badly do so because they mistakenly believe that what they pursue is truly good. This doctrine of acrasia denial (the impossibility of genuine weakness of will) sharply distinguishes his position from common sense morality and from Aristotle, who later argued that one can know the good and fail to do it.
If someone chooses what is harmful, it is because they believe it to be beneficial. Evil is a cognitive failure, not a moral failure in the traditional sense. The cure for vice is therefore education — specifically, the philosophical clarification that enables correct judgement of what is genuinely good for the soul. This makes Socrates' ethics fundamentally intellectualist: the will follows understanding.
Socrates argues provocatively that all virtues — courage, piety, justice, temperance — are ultimately one thing: knowledge of the good. A person who truly knows what courage is cannot lack justice; a person who truly knows piety cannot lack temperance. The apparent diversity of virtues is a symptom of our confused grasp of them. When properly understood, virtue is a single, interconnected understanding of what is genuinely beneficial for the human soul.
The foundational Socratic imperative: care for the soul (epimeleia tēs psychēs) above all else — above money, reputation, political power, and bodily pleasure. The soul is the locus of reasoning and virtue; to neglect it for external goods is a catastrophic self-betrayal. This is the charge Socrates prosecutes against his fellow Athenians in the Apology, and it is the mission for which he accepts execution rather than compromise.
Socrates holds the deeply counterintuitive position that acting unjustly harms the agent more than the victim. To do wrong corrupts one's own soul; to suffer wrong leaves the soul intact. This is why he refuses to escape from prison: the alternative — doing something unjust to save his life — would damage the very thing he has spent his life trying to protect and improve. Death is a lesser harm than moral self-corruption.
Throughout his life, Socrates claimed to be guided by a daimonion — a divine, inner voice or sign that warned him away from certain courses of action but never commanded him positively. It manifested not as a daemon in the later Christian sense (a supernatural being), but as a quasi-divine restraining signal, like an instinct elevated to the status of conscience.
Crucially, the daimonion is apophatic: it says "do not" rather than "do." Socrates uses it to explain why he has not entered politics — the sign would have stopped him constantly, since political life requires compromises incompatible with philosophical integrity. It also explains his refusal to prepare a conventional defence speech: the sign did not prevent him from going to trial, suggesting some higher purpose was at work.
The charge of impiety at his trial included the accusation of introducing kaina daimonia — "new divinities." Scholars debate whether the daimonion is: (a) a genuine religious experience; (b) a poetic or ironic way of speaking about rational intuition; or (c) a psychophysiological phenomenon such as an inner voice associated with his characteristic deep meditative states.
Purely inhibitory — warns but never prescribes. Appears from childhood (Apology 31d). Reliable: Socrates treats its absence on the morning of the trial as confirmation that death may be good for him. Not a universal moral faculty but a personal divine accompaniment.
The daimonion places Socrates in a complex theological position. He affirms traditional Athenian deities and takes religious duties seriously. Yet he also insists that the gods cannot command evil, and that a command from the god to stop philosophising would be one he could not obey. His piety is thus filtered through philosophical reason.
Plutarch wrote an entire essay on the daimonion, interpreting it as a form of divine intellection purer than speech. Apuleius linked it to the Platonic doctrine of personal guardian spirits. In modernity, it has been read as an early articulation of the conscience or unconscious moral intuition by figures from Hegel to Foucault.
In 399 BCE, Socrates was brought before a jury of approximately 500 Athenian citizens on charges of impiety (failing to acknowledge the gods the city acknowledges, introducing new divine entities) and corrupting the youth. Plato's Apology records his defence — not an apology in the modern sense but a formal speech of self-justification (apologia).
The restored democracy of 403 BCE had just overthrown the oligarchic Thirty Tyrants. Two of Socrates' closest associates — Critias and Alcibiades — were associated with oligarchic and anti-democratic politics. A general amnesty prevented direct political charges, but the trial functioned partly as a displaced political prosecution. Anytus, the lead accuser, was a prominent democratic politician.
Rather than seeking acquittal by conventional means — emotional appeals, producing weeping family members, flattering the jury — Socrates turns the trial into a philosophical inquiry. He argues that the Oracle's verdict means he must continue questioning; to stop would be to disobey the god. He proposes, provocatively, that his "punishment" should be free meals at the Prytaneion — Athens' highest civic honour.
The jury voted 280-220 to convict. In the penalty phase, Meletus proposed death; Socrates' counter-proposal of free meals (later revised to a small fine) was read as contempt, and 360 voted for death — more than had voted to convict. Plato's Crito records Socrates' refusal to escape, on grounds that to do so would violate his implicit contract with the laws of Athens.
"I would rather die having spoken after my manner than speak in your manner and live. For neither in war nor yet at law ought I or any man use every way of escaping death."
— Apology 39a (Jowett trans.)Plato's Phaedo takes place on the day of Socrates' death and is the greatest philosophical meditation on mortality in antiquity. Socrates' central claim is that philosophy is essentially a practice of dying: habitually separating the soul from bodily distraction to attend to pure reasoning. Death — the actual separation of soul from body — is therefore not a tragedy but a consummation of the philosophical life.
The body is a distraction and a distorter: it produces appetites, pains, diseases, and false perceptions. Pure knowledge — knowledge of the Forms — is accessible to the soul only when it is liberated from bodily interference. The philosopher who spends a lifetime purifying the soul from bodily attachment should, Socrates argues, greet death as the final, successful completion of that purification. To fear death is to betray the philosophical life one has professed.
The Cyclical Argument: opposites generate each other — life from death, death from life. The Recollection Argument: we remember things (perfect equality, beauty itself) we never encountered in this life, so the soul must have pre-existed. The Affinity Argument: the soul resembles eternal, invisible, unchanging Forms rather than perishable bodies. The Form of Life Argument: the soul participates in the Form of Life and so cannot admit death.
The Phaedo's literary power derives from the contrast between Socrates' absolute composure and his friends' grief. He bathes, says farewell to his wife and children, then returns to philosophy, arguing about immortality until the hemlock takes effect. His final words — "Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius" — are read as either a humorous last joke or a thanksgiving for the cure (death) that heals the disease of embodiment.
Plato was notably absent from the deathbed scene due to illness — or so he claims. The narrative is filtered through Phaedo of Elis (later founder of his own Socratic school) recounting the events to Echecrates of Phlius. This layered narration signals that what we receive is not raw reportage but a philosophically shaped memorial, raising questions about how much of the argument is Socratic versus Platonic.
Eironeia in antiquity meant something closer to deliberate dissimulation or understatement — not gentle wit but a rhetorically and philosophically significant strategy of concealment. Socrates' interlocutors are often unsure whether he is being sincere or mocking them. This uncertainty is not incidental; it is the engine of the dialectic.
When Socrates claims to know nothing and asks to learn from his interlocutors, he is doing something philosophically complex: (a) genuinely claiming ignorance in the technical sense (no systematic knowledge); (b) ironically positioning himself as the learner when he is plainly the superior reasoner; (c) creating a dynamic in which the interlocutor is forced to commit to positions they then must defend.
Kierkegaard, in his doctoral dissertation The Concept of Irony with Constant Reference to Socrates (1841), argued that irony for Socrates was not a rhetorical device but an existential position — a total stance toward existence characterised by infinite negativity: refusing to be caught in any positive doctrine. Gregory Vlastos, by contrast, distinguished "simple" from "complex" irony in Socrates, arguing that sincere claims are embedded within the ironic frame.
A characteristic move: Socrates praises an interlocutor's reputation for wisdom and expresses hope they can teach him. The lavish praise puts the interlocutor on guard — and then traps them when they fail to provide the definition they had promised. Flattery transforms into exposure. Alcibiades in the Symposium describes this as being "bitten by philosophy" — a sting from which one cannot recover.
The difference from sophistic rhetoric is crucial. Sophists use irony to win arguments and gain fees. Socrates uses it in service of truth — his ironic poses are designed to strip away pretense and reach genuine conviction. He claims never to teach for money and never to assert that he has transmitted knowledge to anyone. His irony is inseparable from his philosophy of ignorance.
The deepest Socratic irony may be the trial itself: the city that prided itself on free inquiry condemned its most relentless inquirer. Socrates meets this with a final irony — proclaiming that by executing him the Athenians harm themselves more than him, and that another gadfly will come to take his place. The examined life triumphs in death precisely because death cannot silence what it represents.
After Socrates' death, his followers dispersed and founded distinct schools (haireseis), each seizing a different strand of the Socratic legacy. Plato's Academy was by far the most influential, but the so-called Minor Socratic schools reveal how genuinely open Socratic philosophy was — different interpreters drew radically incompatible conclusions from the same conversations.
Antisthenes of Athens emphasised Socrates' frugality, self-sufficiency (autarkeia), and contempt for conventional goods. He stripped away Platonic metaphysics entirely, insisting that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness and that external circumstances — poverty, slavery, disgrace — are genuinely indifferent. His student Diogenes of Sinope pushed this to provocative extremes, living in a jar and publicly violating social convention to demonstrate philosophy's independence from custom.
Aristippus of Cyrene, also a Socratic associate, developed the polar opposite conclusion: since external goods are genuinely indifferent, and since the only criterion of value is the experience of pleasure and pain, the wise person maximises immediate bodily pleasure. Socratic self-knowledge becomes, on this reading, knowledge of which pleasures to pursue most effectively. The Cyrenaics pioneered a sophisticated philosophy of sensation that anticipates Epicureanism, though without Epicurus' focus on long-term tranquillity.
Euclid of Megara combined Socratic ethics with Eleatic metaphysics: the Good is one, unchanging, and identical with Being, Reason, and God. His school became famous for paradoxes and logical puzzles — the Liar paradox, the Sorites (heap) paradox, the Master Argument — which influenced Stoic logic. The Megarians read Socrates as primarily a logician rather than an ethical reformer, treating the elenchus as a weapon for exposing conceptual incoherence rather than a tool of moral transformation.
Phaedo of Elis (present at the deathbed) and Menedemus of Eretria continued Socratic dialogue in a more modest register, focusing on careful logical practice rather than grand metaphysical or ethical systems. Their works are lost, but their schools suggest that the Socratic tradition had a broad institutional and geographical reach well beyond Athens in the fourth century.
Founded around 387 BCE, the Academy developed Socratic questioning into a comprehensive philosophical programme: metaphysics (Theory of Forms), epistemology (recollection, divided line), political philosophy (the Republic), cosmology (Timaeus), and mathematical training as preparation for philosophy. Plato both preserved Socrates and, arguably, transformed him — the later dialogues' Socrates is increasingly a mouthpiece for distinctly Platonic doctrines.
Since Socrates wrote nothing, all our information comes from secondary sources with their own agendas. The Socratic problem — determining who the "real" Socrates was — is among the most vexed questions in classical scholarship. Three main sources dominate: Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes, with brief but important testimony from Aristotle, who was born fifteen years after Socrates' death.
The richest and most philosophically developed source. The early dialogues (Apology, Euthyphro, Crito, Charmides, Laches, Ion, Hippias Minor, Protagoras) are generally held to depict a more historically plausible Socrates committed to elenchus and profession of ignorance. The middle dialogues (Republic, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Meno) introduce doctrines — the Theory of Forms, the tripartite soul, recollection — that most scholars attribute to Plato himself. Socrates becomes Plato's philosophical mouthpiece. The dramatic frame is Socratic; the doctrine is often not.
Soldier and historian, present in some Socratic circles. His Memorabilia, Symposium, Oeconomicus, and Apology portray a practical, pious, morally earnest Socrates — a model general, household manager, and public citizen. Scholars find Xenophon's Socrates too conventional, too morally tidy, too unlike the disturbing, subversive figure of Plato's early dialogues. Yet Xenophon had no philosophical axe to grind and may preserve aspects of Socrates' character that Plato aestheticised or elevated.
The comic playwright's Clouds (423 BCE) portrays Socrates as a Sophist who runs a "Thinkery," studies meteorology and atheistic cosmology, and teaches dishonest rhetoric for fees. Socrates claims at his trial that this portrait created lasting prejudice. Scholars debate whether Aristophanes preserves a genuine pre-Platonic Socrates (a natural philosopher who later pivoted to ethics) or whether the play is a satirical composite drawing on multiple intellectual figures. The truth is probably a mixture of both.
Aristotle, who never met Socrates, provides important third-party testimony. He attributes to Socrates two specific contributions: epagoge (inductive argument) and universal definitions — and firmly assigns the Theory of Forms to Plato, not Socrates. Aristotle's testimony is valuable precisely because he had no personal stake in the Socratic legend, though he was deeply influenced by both Plato and the Socratic tradition he encountered at the Academy.
Socrates does not deliver his own speech on love but reports the teachings of Diotima of Mantinea — a priestess (possibly fictional, possibly historical) who instructed him in erotic matters. By ventriloquising a female religious authority, Socrates both performs his characteristic modesty and subtly elevates the speech beyond ordinary philosophical argument, giving it quasi-prophetic status.
Eros begins as love of a beautiful body, ascends to love of all beautiful bodies, then to love of beautiful souls, activities, and laws; then to love of the beauty of knowledge; and finally to the direct apprehension of Beauty Itself — absolute, eternal, unchanging. The lover ascends by using each beautiful thing as a step toward a transcendence that ultimately leaves particulars behind. This is the philosophical life understood as erotic ascent.
Plato's Symposium presents a series of speeches on love (eros) at a dinner party following a theatrical victory. Each speaker — Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon — offers a distinctive account. Socrates' speech is the philosophical climax, but it is framed and then implicitly contested by Alcibiades' confession: the most beautiful man in Athens admits that Socrates has rejected his physical advances and that Socrates' strange beauty — of soul rather than body — is the most maddening and irresistible he has encountered.
Alcibiades' speech introduces a different Socrates: not the serene philosopher-teacher but a deeply strange, physically impervious, internally armoured figure who resembles the Sileni statuettes — ugly on the outside, containing golden images of gods within. This is the biographical Socrates embedded in the philosophical Socrates: a man whose personal conduct was the lived argument for his philosophy.
The tension between Diotima's ladder of love (which leaves particular beloved persons behind) and the devotion Socrates inspires in those he actually knew is philosophically unresolved in the dialogue — a deliberate productive tension.
Socrates presents a complex and internally tense political philosophy. He is deeply critical of Athenian democracy — its reliance on popular opinion rather than knowledge, its susceptibility to demagogues, its tendency to reward rhetoric over truth. Yet in the Crito, he constructs the most famous early argument for civic obedience, refusing to escape from prison on the grounds that the Laws of Athens have given him his life and education.
Socrates personifies the Laws of Athens and gives them a speech: they have raised him, educated him, given him everything. By remaining in Athens throughout his life rather than emigrating, he has implicitly agreed to abide by their decisions — including adverse ones. To escape now would be to undermine the legal system entirely, substituting private judgement for public law. This argument anticipates social contract theory and raises deep questions about whether consent can be implied from residence.
In several dialogues, Socrates uses the analogy of craft: we would not take a vote on how to treat a medical condition — we consult an expert. Why, then, should we take votes on questions of justice and the good for the city? This epistemic critique of democracy is among the most politically charged aspects of his thought, and it explains why he attracted associates — Alcibiades, Critias — drawn to anti-democratic politics, though Socrates himself never endorsed oligarchy.
In the Apology, Socrates describes his relationship to Athens as that of a gadfly to a great noble horse: the city is powerful, well-bred, and sluggish, and he has been sent by the god to sting it into wakefulness. This image captures his ambivalence: he loves Athens enough to devote his life to its improvement, and that love expresses itself as an irritant. He is simultaneously Athens' most loyal citizen and its most disruptive one.
The Apology contains a striking exception to the civic obedience of the Crito: if the city ordered him to stop philosophising, Socrates says he would disobey. "I shall obey the god rather than you." This seeds a tradition of principled civil disobedience rooted in conscience — the precedent for Thoreau's civil disobedience, King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail", and modern conscience-based resistance to unjust laws.
Socrates does not present a finished system; he leaves a field of productive tensions that subsequent philosophy has been working through for 2,400 years. These are not failures of his thought but constitutive features of it — the engine of the philosophical tradition he inaugurated.
Socrates claims to know nothing, yet makes strong ethical claims: that virtue is knowledge, that injustice harms the soul of the doer more than the victim, that no one errs willingly. How can someone who professes radical ignorance hold substantive moral positions? The tension runs through every early dialogue: the profession of ignorance seems itself to be a kind of Socratic irony operating at the philosophical level.
The Crito argues for obedience to law; the Apology argues for disobedience to unjust commands. Scholars have proposed numerous reconciliations: (a) only unjust orders from the city are disobeyed; (b) the Crito argument applies specifically to escape, not to the content of his teaching; (c) the tension is irreducible and reflects genuine complexity in Socrates' political self-understanding.
If Socrates' method is purely negative — refuting claims without replacing them — how do we explain his positive commitments: to the soul's immortality, to the Forms (in Platonic texts), to virtue as knowledge? Either these are Platonic additions, or the elenctic method is in service of positive philosophical positions Socrates held but could not fully systematise. The debate between "the historical Socrates" and "the literary Socrates" remains open.
Diotima's ladder of love ends by transcending love for particular persons in favour of Beauty Itself. Yet Socrates himself inspired fierce personal devotion — in Alcibiades, in Plato, in Phaedo. Does the philosophy of love that Socrates teaches require leaving behind the very relationships that motivate the philosophical ascent? This tension between philosophical universalism and personal love is one of the deepest unresolved problems in the Platonic corpus.
Socrates repeatedly insists he has never taught anyone anything. Yet clearly people learned from him — Plato, Alcibiades, Xenophon, dozens of others. The disclaimer is connected to his method: he does not transmit knowledge but stimulates its recognition. Yet this raises the question of his moral responsibility for the actions of his associates, which his prosecutors exploited with some justification.
Socrates' choice not to write was itself a philosophical statement: philosophy is a living activity of dialogue, not a transmissible body of doctrine. Plato's Phaedrus has Socrates argue against writing — ironically in a written dialogue. The oral philosopher who becomes the most-discussed figure in the written philosophical tradition creates an irreducible irony at the origin of Western thought.
Primary Texts
The indispensable starting point: Socrates' defence speech at his trial. Combines historical argument, philosophical doctrine, and personal testimony in the most concentrated form. The best philosophical autobiography in antiquity, notwithstanding its mediated character.
The dialogue of Socrates' death: four arguments for the soul's immortality, a meditation on philosophy as practice of dying, and the mythological vision of the afterlife. Simultaneously the most beautiful and the most technically demanding of the early Platonic works.
Speeches on love culminating in Diotima's ladder and Alcibiades' biographical confession. The most literary of the dialogues and the richest for understanding Socrates as a person — his physical strangeness, his erotic power, his armoured self-sufficiency.
The Crito presents the argument for civic obedience; the Euthyphro the classic refutation of the divine command theory of morality through the Euthyphro dilemma: "Is something pious because the gods love it, or do the gods love it because it is pious?"
Secondary Literature
The landmark twentieth-century study. Vlastos reconstructs a "Socratic philosophy" from the early dialogues, distinguishes it from Platonism, and analyses Socratic irony with extraordinary precision. Indispensable for anyone serious about the Socratic problem.
The best brief scholarly introduction: rigorous, balanced, and engaging. Covers the sources problem, the elenchus, and Socratic ethics without oversimplification. Ideal first secondary text.
The most profound reading of Socratic irony as an existential stance. Kierkegaard sees Socrates as the historical limit-figure of irony — negativity in person — whose execution by Athens is the historical world's refusal of the infinite demand of self-examination.
Essential counterweight to Plato: a more pedestrian, practical, but arguably more historically grounded Socrates. Read alongside Plato's early dialogues to calibrate what different sources emphasise and omit. Book I contains the most sustained defence of Socrates against the charges at his trial.
Socrates' execution in 399 BCE was intended to silence a troublesome gadfly. Instead it created a founding myth for Western philosophy: the image of the thinker who values truth over life, who faces death serenely because he has understood what death is, who refuses to stop questioning even when questioning costs him everything.
Socrates established the model of philosophy as a lived practice, not merely a theoretical discipline. His influence on Stoicism (through Antisthenes and Zeno), Epicureanism (through the Cyrenaic tradition), and all subsequent virtue ethics runs directly through this insight. The Pierre Hadot tradition of reading ancient philosophy as "spiritual exercises" is fundamentally Socratic in orientation.
Socrates questioned everyone — slaves, craftsmen, politicians, generals, poets — without regard to social rank. The radical democratic implication of this universalism (every soul has worth; every person can inquire) coexists with his epistemic critique of majority rule. Both strands remain alive in contemporary political philosophy's debates about deliberative democracy and epistocracy.
The death of Socrates left a wound that Western philosophy has never fully healed: the possibility that the examined life, pursued honestly, terminates not in wisdom's reward but in persecution and execution. Nietzsche, Hegel, Hannah Arendt, and Simone Weil all returned to this wound. Philosophy that begins in Socratic wonder must also reckon with Socratic tragedy.
"I tell you that no greater good can happen to a man than to discuss virtue every day and the other things about which you hear me conversing and examining both myself and others, for the unexamined life is not worth living for man."
— Plato, Apology 38a (Fowler trans.)470–399 BCE · The philosophical revolution has not ended.