By |

Can the Highest Forms of Human Excellence Be Taught?

A disappointed teacher and his student
If the greatest Athenians could not teach virtue to their own sons, can virtue be taught?

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Can courage be taught? Can wisdom? Can goodness?

We take it for granted that mathematics can be taught, languages can be taught, and medicine can be taught. But what of the qualities that matter most? Can they, too, be passed from teacher to pupil, or picked up from a textbook?

More than two thousand years ago, Plato wrestled with exactly this question.

The First Puzzle

In one of Plato’s early dialogues, the Laches, Socrates asks two generals, Laches and Nicias, to define courage. Laches thinks the question an easy one, and asserts that courage is when a soldier is willing to remain at his post and fight against the enemy.

Socrates objects that a soldier who flees from his post can also sometimes be called courageous. He cites the example of the Scythian cavalry who combat both in pursuit and in retreat, and of the mythical hero Aeneas who, Homer says, was always fleeing on horses. Homer praised Aeneas for his knowledge of fear, and called him the ‘counsellor of fear’. When Laches protests that Socrates is speaking of horsemen and charioteers rather than hoplites (foot soldiers), Socrates layers on the example of the Spartan hoplites at the Battle of Plataea, who fled the enemy but then turned back to fight once the enemy lines had broken. 

What Socrates really wants to know is what courage is in all of its instances—not only for the hoplite, but also for the horseman, the charioteer, and every other class of warrior, as well as for those who ‘show courage in illness and poverty’, ‘are brave in the face of pain and fear’, and so on. What is it that all these instances of courage have in common? For example, quickness can be found in running, in speaking, and in playing the lyre, and in each instance, ‘quickness’ can be defined as ‘the quality that accomplishes much in a little time’. Is there a similar, single, unifying definition of ‘courage’ that can apply to all of its instances? Before reading on, think upon it for yourself… How would you define courage?

This time, Laches defines courage as ‘a sort of endurance of the soul’. But Socrates points out that endurance can be foolish as well as wise, and foolish endurance is likely to be harmful. After several more attempts, Nicias suggests that courage is some sort of knowledge or wisdom. Socrates says that, if Nicias means that courage is knowledge of the true grounds of fear and hope, then courage must be very rare among men; while animals, which want for such knowledge, could never be called ‘courageous’ but at most ‘fearless’—which, indeed, ordinary language use seems to confirm. Nicias concurs, and surmises that the same is also true of children: ‘Or do you really suppose I call all children courageous, who fear nothing because they have no sense?’

Socrates presses the argument further until he reaches a remarkable conclusion: if courage, and virtue in general, is knowledge, it cannot be separated from the rest of knowledge and wisdom. In seeking to define courage, the three of them have succeeded in defining virtue herself. Virtue is knowledge, which is why people with some measure of one virtue usually have a similar measure of the other virtues and of virtue in general—a thesis known as the Unity of the Virtues.

The First Solution

Courage, says Socrates, is knowledge or wisdom. Suppose I am walking along a beach and see someone drowning. I know that I can’t swim and that the currents are strong, but jump in anyway because a human life is at stake. Moments later, I too need rescuing. Having misjudged the situation, I have only made it worse, and acted not courageously but recklessly.

The lifeguard, in contrast, is a strong swimmer and equipped with a floater. From her years of experience and familiarity with the beach, she knows that if she dives in she stands an excellent chance of making a rescue. Of course, there is some risk involved, but the potential benefit is so large and so likely that it far outweighs the risk. If the lifeguard truly understands all this, she will ‘courageously’ dive in. If she does not dive in, she has not fully grasped the situation.

One of Socrates’ most famous arguments is that no one ever knowingly does evil. People do wrong not because their ethics are overwhelmed by a desire for pleasure, as is often believed, but because they are unable to weigh up pleasures and pains. They act with recklessness or cowardice or foolishness or vice (which are all really one and the same thing) because, from their limited perspective, it seems like the right or best thing to do. But if they knew better, they would behave differently. Virtue, then, is a form of knowledge.

The Fatal Objection

If Socrates is right in holding that courage and all of virtue is knowledge, then surely courage and the other virtues can be taught by the same methods as geometry or medicine or any other field of human knowledge. So who is wrong, Socrates in holding that courage is knowledge, or us in our common intuition that courage cannot simply be taught?

Plato returned to the problem in a later dialogue. In the Meno, Socrates observes that people with wisdom and virtue are very poor at imparting those qualities. Themistocles, the great Athenian statesman and general, was able to teach his son Cleophantus skills such as standing upright on horseback and shooting javelins, but no one ever credited the poor wretch with anything like his father’s wisdom—and the same could also be said of Lysimachus and his son Aristides, and Thucydides and his sons Melesias and Stephanus.

Perhaps it was too early in 402, the dramatic date of the Meno, for Socrates to have added his own three sons to the roll of dolts and dunderheads, but Aristotle, who had the benefit of hindsight, tells us that they too grew up to be ‘fools and dullards’.

In another dialogue, the Protagoras, Socrates says that Pericles, who led Athens at the peak of its golden age, gave his sons Paralus and Xanthippus the most excellent instruction in everything that could be learnt from teachers. But when it came to wisdom, this paragon of wisdom simply left them to ‘wander at their own free will in a sort of hope that they would light upon virtue of their own accord’.

A New Answer

If virtue cannot be taught, not even by the most eminent and distinguished of Athenians, then it is not, after all, a type of knowledge.

But then how, asks Meno, did good people come into being?

Socrates replies that he and Meno have overlooked that right action is possible under guidance other than that of knowledge. A man who has knowledge of the road to Larissa (a city in Thessaly) may make a good guide, but a man who has only correct opinion of the road, but has never been and does not know, may in some cases make just as good a guide. If he who thinks the truth can be just as good a guide to Larissa as he who knows the truth, then correct opinion can be just as good a guide to right action as knowledge.

If this be true, how is knowledge, which is the more highly prized, any different from correct opinion? Socrates compares correct opinions to the statues of Daedalus (a mythical architect and craftsman of unsurpassed skill), which had to be tied down to prevent them from running away. Correct opinions can be tied down with ‘an account of the reason why’, whereupon they cease to be correct opinions and petrify into knowledge.

Since courage and the other parts of virtue are not knowledge, all that remains is for them to be correct opinion. This much explains why the likes of Themistocles and Lysimachus and even the great Pericles were unable to make anything much out of their sons—and why, then as today, having children is to dice with the devil. Good people are no different from soothsayers, prophets, and poets, who say many true things when they are inspired but have no real knowledge of what they are saying.

The Teachers We Remember

Courage, like all the virtues, consists not in knowledge but in correct opinion. The virtues relate to human behaviour, and in particular to good or moral behaviour—that is, to ethics. In ethics, the choice of one action over another, or others, involves a complex and indeterminate calculus that cannot be condensed into, and hence expressed as, knowledge. Whereas knowledge is concrete and exact, correct opinion is subtle and ineffable, and more the province of intuition than of reason, of art than of science. For this reason, correct opinion cannot be taught but only ever invited or inspired.

The best education consists not in being taught but in being inspired.

The teachers who we hold in our hearts, those we never forget, are not those who assiduously taught us the most facts, or fastidiously covered every bulleted point on the syllabus, but those who inspired us and opened us up to ourselves and to the world.

Unfortunately, many people are not amenable to being inspired, not even by the most charismatic teachers or greatest works of art—which is why, in the final reckoning, Socrates and Plato held virtue to be a gift of the gods.

…if we were right in the way we spoke … virtue would be neither an inborn quality nor taught, but comes to those who possess it as a gift of the gods which is not accompanied by understanding, unless there is someone among our statesmen who can make another into a statesman. If there were one, he would be said to be among the living as Homer said Tiresias was among the dead, namely, that ‘he alone retained his wits while the others flitted about like shadows’. —Plato, Meno

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Socrates essays

Explore all Plato essays

Explore all Rhetoric essays

Explore all Cognition essays

By |

Schopenhauer on the Benefits of Skipping School

Schopenhauer at the age of 14
Schopenhauer at the age of fourteen.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 16 August 2026.

Arthur Schopenhauer was born on February 22, 1788, at 114 Heiliggeistgasse in the free city of Danzig (present-day Gdańsk, Poland). His father, Heinrich Floris, was one of the city’s most prominent merchants. Heinrich Floris was determined that his only son should become a merchant, and regularly upbraided him for his poor posture and even worse handwriting.

In 1793, when Arthur was five years old, Prussia annexed Danzig. The Schopenhauer family then moved to the free Hanseatic city of Hamburg. At nine years old, Arthur was sent to Le Havre in France to live with the family of his father’s business associate, Grégoire de Blésimaire, who had a son, Jean Anthime, of Arthur’s age. The two years that Arthur spent in Le Havre were, he claimed, among the happiest of his life. He became fluent in French, learnt to play the flute, and forged a lifelong friendship with Jean-Anthime. Later in life, Schopenhauer would play the flute every day—leading Nietzsche to wonder whether he was indeed such a pessimist.

When Arthur was in his mid-teens, the principal of his private school, Dr Runge, who recognised his exceptional potential, attempted to persuade Heinrich Floris to redirect him onto an academic path. Arthur, too, exerted considerable pressure on his father. To settle the matter in his favour, the wily Heinrich Floris offered Arthur a Hobson’s choice between remaining in Hamburg to learn Latin and prepare for university, or accompany his parents on a luxurious two-year pleasure tour through Europe—on the condition that he commit to a merchant apprenticeship upon their return.

Picking Up English

Thus, in 1803, Arthur set off on a tour of Holland, Britain, France, Switzerland, Austria, and Prussia. In England, he spent twelve weeks at Reverend Thomas Lancaster’s academy in Wimbledon, while his parents toured the North. Teachers thought of him as a ‘seething, belligerent pupil’. He developed a lifelong antipathy towards Anglicanism and later described the experience as a form of ‘incarceration’. But he became fluent in English, and, later, would write German in a more limpid English style.

Indeed, Schopenhauer is regarded as one of the greatest stylists in the German language. In On Language and Words, he would argue that language, though essential for human reasoning, shapes and limits our thoughts. It often serves as a substitute for true thinking and distances us from intuitive perception and action. However, learning another language can increase our range and flexibility of thought by obliging us to separate the concept from the word and to break down and reconstruct thoughts according to a different organisational scheme. This is all the more true of the classical languages (Latin and Greek), which call for a non-literal translation that forces a melting down and recasting of thought.

Three Hangings and a Penitentiary

Tourism in those days could take in the ugly as well as the beautiful. On June 8, 1803, Arthur witnessed three hangings from the window of a pub opposite Newgate prison in London. He noted in his travel diary that the men, right before the drop, took to praying: ‘One of them, who moved his hands up and down as he prayed, made the same movement a couple more times after he had fallen.’

On April 8, 1804, he visited the Bagne de Toulon, to be made famous by Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. ‘Can one think of a more terrible feeling than that of one of these unfortunates as he is chained to the bench in the dark galley and from which nothing but death can separate him?’

Later, he would compare the whole world to a penitentiary, and this period of his life to the Buddha’s awakening, when Prince Siddhartha (later, the Buddha) ventured out of the palace only to be confronted everywhere by the ‘Four Sights’ of age, sickness, death, and an ascetic monk.

Why Schopenhauer Warned Against Book Knowledge

There can be no doubt that Arthur gained a lot more from his travels than he would have done from sitting in a Hamburg classroom. Ironically, had his father never taken him out of school, he may never have become Schopenhauer. 

His worldliness, he would argue, gave him an advantage over ‘mere scholars’ or ‘book philosophers’, for true thought must be rooted in direct observation and firsthand experience of the world.

Reliance on books is like ‘thinking with somebody else’s head’ and produces only superficial knowledge, which, ‘like an artificial limb, false tooth, or waxen nose’, is not organically woven into our being. Children, he thought (like Jean-Jacques Rousseau), should not be exposed to ‘theories and doctrines’ until the age of sixteen.

In On Reading and Books, he wrote:

For the person who studies to gain insight, books and studies are merely rungs of the ladder he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him one step, he leaves it behind. On the other hand, the many who study to fill their memory do not use the rungs of the ladder for climbing, but take them off and load themselves with them to take away, rejoicing at the increasing weight of the burden. They remain below forever, since they are carrying what ought to have carried them.

Can Reading Make You Stupid?

Schopenhauer cannot have believed that all reading makes us stupid, or he would not have written so many books. The problem is not reading as such, but what kind of reading, and when or in what order. The point, as he himself says, is to use books as rungs and climb beyond them, rather than gather a burden of rungs and carry them around like a donkey.

Much formal education consists in feeding us detached facts in the hope that some may stick and perhaps even inspire us to follow the subject. But true learning often proceeds in the opposite direction. We learn far more readily when we start from a place of meaning and emotion. Then, rather than being weighed down by the information, we thoroughly assimilate it, actively seeking out the answers to the further questions that it raises and moving, as it were, onto the next rung of the ladder.

Consider philosophy. Many people read Sartre at school or university. They hear that ‘existence precedes essence’, write an essay on existentialism, pass an examination, and then carry on living as if they were none the wiser. But pick up Sartre because you feel trapped and are questioning your life choices, and suddenly Existentialism Is a Humanism becomes electrifying. For Schopenhauer, Newgate and Toulon were not abstract answers to somebody else’s questions, but vivid experiences that set him—as the Four Sights did the Buddha—onto the path to enlightenment.

The problem, then, is not reading per se, but reading without intellectual appetite. When we are hungry for knowledge, we will make sure not to read the unedifying books that merely confirm or comfort us without being able to lift us onto the next rung of the ladder.

The best education makes us hungry before it feeds us, or trusts us to feed ourselves.

Continue Exploring

Schopenhauer was the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought. The German Greeks explores his philosophy alongside those of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche, tracing the remarkable development of German philosophy from the Enlightenment to modernity.

You may also enjoy

Explore all German Philosophy essays

Explore all Cognition essays

By |

Learn the Six Classical Parts of Discourse Used by Cicero

Cicero speaking in the Roman Senate
Cicero (106–43 BCE), Rome’s greatest orator and one of the principal architects of classical rhetoric.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Every good speech and essay has a structure. Yet few students are ever taught one.

For more than two thousand years, great speakers have relied on a simple six-part structure—a framework that stretches from Cicero to Churchill and remains just as useful today. Many Oxford students have told me that no one had ever taught them these six parts of discourse, despite years of essay writing. Yet, until surprisingly recently, they formed part of every educated person’s rhetorical training. Today, few people have even heard of them.

The six parts of discourse are, of course, just as useful for structuring essays as they are for composing speeches.

Table of the Six Parts of Discourse

Introduction (Exordium)

The exordium introduces your subject and purpose. It may also establish your authority for speaking or writing.

Above all, it should capture your audience’s attention. You might begin with a striking fact, an intriguing question, or a sense of urgency—but whatever your approach, make your audience want to hear more.

Keep it brief and clear. Never bore, confuse, or test your audience, and certainly not in the opening lines.

Winston Churchill’s first speech as Prime Minister begins:

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

In just twelve words, he captures attention, establishes the gravity of the moment, and prepares his audience for what is to come.

Narration (Narratio)

The narratio provides the background your audience needs to understand the issue.

How did the problem arise? Why does it matter? What has already been tried? What does the evidence suggest? Have similar situations arisen before?

Important: Although the narration appears objective, it is also your first opportunity to frame the debate. The facts you include—and the order in which you present them—shape everything that follows.

Consider the difference between saying, “Taxes have risen by 2%” and “Investment in schools and hospitals has increased by 2%”. The facts may be identical, but the way you present them shapes how your audience understands them.

Division (Divisio)

The divisio is the turning point in your speech.

In effect, the division says:

This is the issue. This is why it matters. And this is how I intend to address it.

Like the introduction, the division should be brief. If it becomes too elaborate, it begins to feel contrived.

The rhetorical handbook Ad Herennium (c. 80 BCE) illustrates division with this dilemma from Greek mythology:

Orestes killed his mother, Clytemnestra; on that everyone agrees. But was he justified in doing so? That is the real point in dispute.

Proof (Confirmatio)

The proof is the heart of your speech. Here you present your arguments and support them with examples and evidence.

Aristotle distinguished between technical proofs, such as logical arguments (logos), and non-technical proofs, such as laws, contracts, witnesses, and authoritative testimony.

In the Rhetoric, he observes that ‘witnesses’ need not be living people. Homer, Hesiod, Solon, proverbs, and received wisdom can all serve as ‘ancient witnesses’. Today, we do much the same whenever we quote recognised experts or respected authorities.

Ancient witnesses can be appealed to indirectly, as when Barack Obama echoed Martin Luther King, who in turn echoed Abraham Lincoln, who echoed the King James Bible in the opening line of the Gettysburg Address of 1863:

Four score and seven years ago [i.e. 87 years ago] our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Refutation (Confutatio)

A persuasive speech anticipates objections.

The confutatio acknowledges opposing arguments before answering them. Ideally, it does so fairly and convincingly, though in practice speakers often exaggerate or caricature an opponent’s position.

Modern political campaigns often do exactly this. Terms such as ‘death tax’ or ‘dementia tax’ deliberately reframe an opponent’s proposal before it can be considered on its merits.

One particularly effective technique is concession (concessio). By conceding a limited point, you appear reasonable and fair while strengthening your larger argument:

Yes, that’s true. But the real question is…

Far from weakening your case, a well-judged concession often makes it more persuasive.

If your proof is weak, you might instead begin with a forceful refutation in the hope that no one notices the lack of argument. It is a trick as old as rhetoric itself—and one that is still surprisingly common.

Conclusion (Peroratio)

The peroratio brings your speech or essay to a memorable close.

It usually summarises your main arguments before ending with an emotional appeal or call to action.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous Day of Infamy speech, delivered the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, ends with precisely such a peroration:

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.

With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.

I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese empire.

When to Break the Rules

Many great speeches follow this six-part structure, whether consciously or intuitively. But the framework should never become a formula.

Once you’ve mastered its principles, they can also be broken.

Cicero himself ignored his own advice in the opening of the First Catilinarian, launching immediately into a passionate attack:

When, O Catiline, do you mean to cease abusing our patience? How long is that madness of yours still to mock us? When is there to be an end to that unbridled audacity of yours, swaggering about as it does now?

Nor must every speech contain every part. Aristotle regarded only two as essential: statement (narratio) and argument (confirmatio). Everything else is optional.

The six parts of discourse are not rules but tools. They provide a framework within which clarity and originality can flourish.

The aim is not to sound methodical but natural. Techniques such as using simple language, expressing uncertainty (dubitatio), or correcting yourself aloud (epergesis) can all help create the impression of sincerity and spontaneity.

Craft is something that you learn; art, that you unlearn.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Rhetoric essays

Explore all Cognition essays

By |

The Socratic Method: Why Socrates Is Remembered for His Method, Not His Answers

Socrates questions Euthyphro outside the Stoa Basileios, or Porch of the King Archon, in Athens.
Socrates questions Euthyphro outside the Stoa Basileios, or Porch of the King Archon, in Athens.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 4 August 2026.

Socrates is often called ‘the father of philosophy’. Yet unlike Plato, Aristotle, or Kant, he left no books, no philosophical system, and scarcely any positive doctrines such as Plato’s Forms and Aristotle’s Four Causes. Instead, he is remembered above all for a method of thinking, questioning, and undermining.

This method, known as the Socratic method or method of elenchus, might seem disarmingly simple. Instead of asserting, contradicting, and correcting, Socrates asked apparently innocent questions. Instead of lecturing or teaching, he enquired. Instead of telling people what to think, he led them, rather like a modern therapist, to discover for themselves that they knew far less than they had imagined.

But how did Socrates arrive at this extraordinary way of testing, teaching, and philosophising? According to his student Plato, the answer lies in a remarkable visit to the Oracle of Delphi.

The Oracle of Delphi

The story goes that Socrates had a characterful friend called Chaerephon who went to Delphi and boldly asked the oracle to tell him whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates. Astonishingly, the oracle replied that there was no one wiser, leaving Socrates, who knew only that he knew nothing, perplexed.

To discover the meaning of the oracle, Socrates questioned several supposedly wise people—first the politicians, then the poets, and then the artisans—and in each case concluded: ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’ Socrates was the wisest of all people not because he knew everything or anything, but because he knew what he did not know.

From then on, Socrates dedicated himself to the service of the gods by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, ‘if he is not, showing him that he is not.’ As a result, he acquired a reputation for wisdom and a following among young men of the richer classes, who began to imitate him. But he also earnt the enmity of those whom he had exposed, and of those who stood beside them.

Plato paints the oracle story as the turning point in Socrates’ career. By validating his skeptical stance to the philosophers who came before, it gave him the confidence, and the impetus, to develop his own, distinct manner and method of doing philosophy.

But is the oracle story even true, or is it just another of Plato’s myths? The oracle story conveniently serves to frame Socrates, who had been put to death as a heretic and corrupter of youths, as having been on a noble, divinely inspired mission, attached by the gods to Athens as upon a great horse which ‘needed to be stirred up by a kind of gadfly’. In favour of the story being true is that it is also related by Xenophon, who knew Socrates well, although in his version the oracle replies that there is no one more just (rather than wiser) than Socrates.

The Socratic Method

Plato might also have intended the oracle story as a sort of origin myth for the Socratic method, or method of elenchus.

But although Socrates may have perfected the method of elenchus, it is unlikely that he originated a mode of conversation that seems so naturally and fundamentally human. For instance, in Plato’s Parmenides, the much older Parmenides himself uses the method of elenchus on Socrates to undermine Plato’s Theory of the Forms. But it remains that while the sophists of his day tried to make a show of their knowledge, Socrates tried to make a show of his and everyone else’s ignorance.

The method of elenchus, especially as employed by Socrates, consists in questioning one or more people about a certain concept such as justice or virtue with the aim of exposing a contradiction in their initial assumptions and provoking a reappraisal of the concept. As the process is iterative, it leads to an increasingly precise or refined definition of the concept, and, in due course, to a shared recognition that it eludes our understanding—and hence that we know far less than we thought we did.

People rarely change their minds because someone tells them otherwise. They are more likely to change their minds when they discover, for themselves, that their own beliefs are inconsistent.

With our initial dogmatism transmuted into a state of puzzlement and suspended judgment, we are ready to become much more open and subtle thinkers—assuming, of course, that we have not first become angry and resentful.

Socratic Irony

Strictly speaking, the Socratic method is broader than the method of elenchus. Elenchus is the process of questioning and refuting by which Socrates exposes contradictions in his interlocutors’ beliefs. But it is only one of several techniques that he employs. Others include Socratic irony, in which he feigns ignorance while quietly steering the conversation; the search for rigorous definitions, by which he moves from examples to essences; and the so-called maieutic (‘midwifery’) method. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates compares himself to a midwife, helping others to give birth not to children but to ideas of their own.

To have our understanding of a moral concept undermined is also to have our values undermined, and, with that, our sense of self. As I argue in The Problem with Critical Thinking, the greatest obstacle to reason is neither dullness nor ignorance, but our unconscious need to protect our sense of self. This is the realm of self-deception.

To manage their anger and anxieties, and to keep them talking, Socrates often flattered his interlocutors while himself playing the fool. In the Orator, Cicero esteems that, ‘for irony and dissimulation’, Socrates ‘far excelled all other men in the wit and genius which he displayed.’ Simon Blackburn in the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy defines Socratic irony with brio as ‘Socrates’ irritating tendency to praise his hearers while undermining them, or to disparage his own superior abilities while manifesting them.’

Here is an example of Socratic irony, combined with a little mock flirting, from Plato’s Meno, so pushed as to be almost parodic:

Had I the command of you as well as of myself, Meno, I would not have enquired whether virtue is given by instruction or not, until we had first ascertained what it is. But as you think only of controlling me who am your slave, and never of controlling yourself—such being your notion of freedom, I must yield to you, for you are irresistible.

The technique resembles that used by the TV character Lieutenant Columbo to trap villains. One of the few miscreants who can see through Columbo’s fumbling and forgetful façade is the husband-killer Leslie Williams:

LW: You know, Columbo, you’re almost likeable in a shabby sort of way. Maybe it’s the way you come slouching in here with your shopworn bag of tricks.

Columbo: Me? Tricks?

LW: The humility, the seeming absent-mindedness, the homey anecdotes about the family: the wife, you know?

Columbo: Really?

LW: Yeah, Lieutenant Columbo, fumbling and stumbling along. But it’s always the jugular that he’s after.

The Socratic Method Today

Despite its pitfalls, and its potential for underhandedness, the Socratic method remains popular in education, especially at its acme, and has also been severally adapted for psychotherapy.

In the 1990s, during an institutional audit at the University of Oxford, a team of external assessors met the philosophers and asked about recent developments to their teaching methods. The question was met with a stunned silence, finally broken by Christopher Peacocke, the then Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics, who observed that Socrates had discovered the right way to teach philosophy more than two thousand years ago and that nobody since had been able to significantly improve upon it.

Continue Exploring

To delve deeper into Socrates, see The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

You may also enjoy

Explore all Socrates essays

Explore all Rhetoric essays

Explore all Cognition essays