The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

by Ward Farnsworth

makes moral inquiry a common human enterprise, open to every man. Its practice calls for no adherence to a philosophical system, or mastery of a specialized technique, or acquisition of a technical vocabulary. It calls for common sense and common speech.1

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. Their cousins can tell you nothing about them. They lived in their writings, and so their house and street life was trivial and commonplace.

Socratic philosophy starts with a love of truth, but as a matter of action its first task is negative: shaking off the delusion of wisdom.

The best strategy against them is an internalized Socrates who says that you’re not as wise as you seem to yourself.

If you’re sure that you know nothing, the claim seems self-refuting.

And yet the Academic Skeptics didn’t give up on their search for the truth. Falling short made them more diligent.

Yes, Phaedo, he replied, and how melancholy, if there be such a thing as truth or certainty or possibility of knowledge—that a man should have lighted upon some argument or other which at first seemed true and then turned out to be false, and instead of blaming himself and his own want of wit, because he is annoyed, should at last be too glad to transfer the blame from himself to arguments in general: and for ever afterwards should hate and revile them, and lose truth and the knowledge of realities.