Socrates

Socrates (c. 470–399 BCE) was an Athenian philosopher who wrote nothing himself yet became the central figure of Western philosophy, known almost entirely through the dialogues of his pupil Plato and the memoirs of Xenophon.

A stonemason’s son who served as a soldier and lived in conspicuous poverty, he spent his days in the Athenian agora questioning citizens about justice, virtue, piety, and the good, exposing the emptiness of confident opinions through the relentless cross-examination that bears his name.

In 399 BCE he was tried on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, and was executed by hemlock, accepting the sentence rather than abandon his philosophical calling. For the mind-power lineage, Socrates matters as the philosopher who turned attention inward.

The Delphic maxim “know thyself” became, in his hands, the conviction that self-examination is the first and highest task, and that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” He claimed to be guided by a private inner voice or sign, the daimonion, that warned him against wrong action—an early model of an inward, supra-rational source of guidance.

And his doctrine that virtue is knowledge, that no one does wrong willingly but only through ignorance, located the root of conduct and character in the state of one’s understanding, making the mind the decisive arena of human life.