From What Is the Socratic Method?
CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS
The Socratic method is a way to seek truths by your own lights.
It is a system, a spirit, a method, a type of philo- sophical inquiry, an intellectual technique, all rolled into one.
Socrates himself never spelled out a “method.” However, the Socratic method is named after him
because Socrates, more than any other before or since, models for us philosophy practiced—philosophy as deed, as way of living, as something that any of us can do. It is an open system of philosophical inquiry that allows one to interrogate from many vantage points.
Gregory Vlastos, a Socrates scholar and professor of philosophy at Princeton, described Socrates’
Although not specifically concerned with ethics, this short piece by Christopher Phillips makes a persuasive case for using the “Socratic method” to think through difficult philosophical issues. To see the Socratic method applied to ethics, read the excerpt from Plato’s Euthyphro that follows on p. 16.
Christopher Phillips, from Socrates Café. Copyright © 2001 by Christopher Phillips. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. and Felicia Eth Literary Representation.