I just finished reading a recent monograph on the historical Socrates that offers some interesting insights. Swedish scholar Otto H. Linderborg’s Socrates and his Demise: An Examination of the Historical Figure (London: Routledge, 2025) is a well-researched and thoughtful contribution to the Socratic Problem. The Socratic Problem arises from the fact that we have a generous number of portrayals of Socrates philosophizing with his contemporaries, but we have nothing from the philosopher himself; and the portrayals either do not agree with each other in detail (those of Plato and Xenophon) or completely clash (that of Aristophanes the comic poet in relation to the followers of Socrates, including Plato and Xenophon). Furthermore, Plato presents very different portrayals of Socrates in his early or Socratic dialogues, in which Socrates claims to have no special knowledge and seeks enlightenment from others, and in his middle dialogues, in which Socrates has elaborate theories of everything, which he gladly expounds at length (as in The Republic).
The situation is complicated by the fact that most of the Socratic literature consists of fictional encounters between Socrates and contemporary figures. So how can we say we know anything for certain about the historical Socrates and his philosophy (if he actually had one)?
As Linderborg notes (pp. 25-26), much recent scholarship has proceeded under the assumption that the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues is meant to represent the historical Socrates having the sorts of conversations he actually had with the types of people he actually talked with. This approach, which arguably goes back to Aristotle, was championed by Gregory Vlastos, professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, in many articles and in his book, Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher (Cambridge U. Press, 1991). (I had the privilege of studying with Vlastos in a summer seminar he taught at the U. of California, Berkeley, in 1981.)
On this theory (which I myself subscribe to with only minor divergences), Plato presented the method and (largely implicit) theory of his mentor Socrates in his early works, when Plato accepted that theory.[1] As Plato matured, he developed his own theory of knowledge, the Theory of Recollection, based on Pythagorean ideas, and his own theory of reality, the Theory of Forms, and put those theories in the mouth of Socrates, making the character in the middle dialogues a mouthpiece for Platonic ideas, which Plato saw as supplementing and supporting the moral theory Socrates had espoused.
Linderborg points out that, with rich ancient sources on Socrates, but notable differences in their interpretations, and in light of the use of fiction in virtually all the portrayals, we need criteria to distinguish fact from fiction (pp. 12, 14-16). He gives a helpful overview of the history of the Socratic Problem (16-29) and then proceeds to offer his own solution.
In his second chapter (31-52), Linderborg focuses attention on the trial of Socrates, in 399 BCE, on the charges of impiety and corrupting the youth. The trial does offer a clear point at which the enigmatic philosopher stepped onto the stage of history, and thus provides a chance to evaluate the legend in a very public moment. Evaluating the charges against Socrates, Linderborg points out their superficial character and asks, “It is plausible to assert that the religious motives merely served as a pretext for a politically motivated prosecution …? (45). He concludes that “The political motivation—manifested as a democratic reaction against those, whose activities were perceived to pose and imminent threat to the recently restored democracy—was the catalyst that led to the initiation of the prosecution” (46). He argues that “prosecution and conviction” of a thinker “for the sake of his intellectual pursuits were exceedingly rare occurrences in Classical Athens” (48).
I agree that the motives were political. But the way Linderborg puts the point seems a bit misleading. There were, famously, a number of prosecutions of intellectuals on religious grounds. Anaxagoras in the mid-fifth century BCE was accused of impiety for saying the heavenly bodies were stones rather than deities, and Aristotle in 323 BCE was accused of impiety for his theological views.[2] Both philosophers cleared out of Athens before the threatened trial (so they were not “convicted”), but the grounds seem clearly political in both cases. Anaxagoras was a member of Pericles’ circle, and presumably its “weakest link”; Aristotle was the former tutor of Alexander the Great, and on the death of his protégé during a political reaction against Macedonian rule, Aristotle suddenly became persona non grata in Athens.
Trials on religious grounds were not rare in Athens. But they were often pretexts for political attacks. As one scholar of Athenian law has observed, “It is tempting to assert that Athenian religious trials were all about politics: a surprisingly high proportion of known impiety trials reveal, on examination, a surprisingly strong political agenda.”[3]
These observations tend to support Linderborg’s claim that Socrates’ trial was political in character. But they also indicate that there was a serious effort to disguise their import. Anytus, the political heavyweight, seems to have recruited Meletus, a political nobody, to be his point man, presumably to make the trial look non-political. And presumably the attack on Socrates’ religious persuasion was meant to stir up resentment among the Many who did not have a clue about Socrates’ philosophical doctrines or his political leanings. The whole notion of legal pretexts presupposes a distinction between the cognoscenti and the ignoranti. The former developed their accusations around hot-button issues that were likely to inflame the latter, while masking their own political agenda.
In his third chapter (53-67), Linderborg uses reports of Socrates’ trial to examine the basis of his philosophical views. He argues that the story of Chaerephon’s trip to the oracle at Delphi was an invention of Plato’s, accepted only by Xenophon for similar reasons, to provide Socrates with a quasi-religious basis for his philosophical “mission” (56).[4]
As to Socrates’ profession of ignorance, so prominent in Plato’s Apology, Linderborg recognizes that it may be genuine, but that it is equally possible that Plato was stressing the need for a new theory of knowledge that he himself would develop (63).
In a compressed account of philosophical development, Linderborg asserts that “the starting point [of philosophical development] was a comprehensive understanding in which the entire worldly order was conceived of as divinely predetermined” (64). This description, however, seems to fit neither with mythical theogonies, in which a haphazard genealogy of deities turned into a power struggle with conflicts and usurpations; nor with philosophical cosmogonies and cosmologies, in which events came about by the interaction of natural substances and forces.
Linderborg goes on to describe the emergence of the nomos-physis distinction, which distinguished between actions and institutions governed by law and custom (nomos), and those governed by nature (physis), often taken as the law of the jungle. This approach did emerge in the second half of the fifth century BCE in sophistic circles. Linderborg interprets Socrates’ philosophy as an attempt to challenge what he calls “physis-egoism,” a kind of might-makes-right attitude one can see manifested, for instance, by Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias (66-67).
Linderborg’s analysis does capture one important aspect of Socrates’ thought, the construction of a moral philosophy in reaction to the amoral or immoral systems of some sophists. It also, however, tends to reduce philosophy to a kind of by-product of social-political developments. The rich evolution of philosophical ideas in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE gets reduced to a few paragraphs. And the relationship between Socrates and Plato is mentioned in passing, but is not seriously considered here.
There are two aspects of the sources that make possible a more robust reconstruction of Socrates’ philosophy. First, there is a broad agreement among the Socratics, including several followers whose writings survive only in fragmentary way, about Socrates’ method and philosophy, echoed by Aristotle, an independent scholar. Second, Plato, the source who is the most sophisticated philosopher among Socrates’ followers and the most aristocratic, presents two very different portrayals of Socrates: one in the early, Socratic dialogues, and one in the middle dialogues. The character of the former is, as Linderborg notes, democratic in his willingness to philosophize with anyone; the latter is snobbish and contemptuous of the Many.[5] We may infer that the former figure is radically un-Platonic, while the latter figure is radically un-Socratic.
It is highly unlikely that Plato was ever comfortable with Socrates’ inquiries into the beliefs of the man on the street. And it is highly unlikely that the historical Socrates would allow only the highly educated individual to philosophize, as the character Socrates does in Plato’s Republic. Thus we can infer that the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues is not a mouthpiece for Plato, and that his method, which is based on opinions extracted ex homine, from the interlocutor, and refutations directed ad hominem, to the interlocutor, is not Plato’s. And the doctrines that can be extracted from the Socrates of the early dialogues, requiring him to examine random individuals for confirmations of his own views, are not Plato’s.
No doubt Plato was enthralled by the wisdom, the paradoxes, and the sterling character of barefoot street philosopher Socrates. No doubt he could not reconcile Socrates’ populism with his own elitism. In time he found a way to base Socrates’ moral theory on epistemic and metaphysical foundations that were attainable only to the well-born, highly educated, and disciplined individual.
Without Socrates there could not be a Plato. And without a critique of Socratic philosophy there could not be a Platonic philosophy. So Plato had to resurrect Socrates and give him a voice so that he could let us discover the barefoot philosopher for ourselves—and then see how to move beyond his limited domain to a world of a priori knowledge and transcendent ideals.
[1] I am not committed to the notion that Plato was, when he was writing Socratic dialogues, starting in the 390s, necessarily an orthodox disciple of Socrates; some of his early dialogues, e.g. the Charmides, leave open the possibility that Socrates might be wrong in some of his views. The Socrates of the middle dialogues sometimes refutes Socratic views (e.g. Republic VI, 505b-c, compare Charmides 174a-d; contrast Protagoras 360d).
[2] Anaxagoras: Plutarch Pericles 32.1, 3 = DK 59A17; Aristotle: Diogenes Laertius 5. 5-6.
[3] S. C. Todd, The Shape of Athenian Law (Oxford, 1993: 308).
[4] I have defended the historicity of the oracle in a paper written with my former student, and now Ph.D., Justin Barney, “On the Date of Chaerephon’s Visit to Delphi.” Phoenix 70 (2016): 274-89. (It can be viewed at byu.academia.edu/DanielWGraham .) Linderborg does not cite this article.
[5] See Plato Republic VI, 493e-496a.