Education, history of philosophy of

1. Socrates and the sophists

Educational philosophy began in the Greek classical period with the examination of the educational claims of the sophists undertaken by Socrates. The sophists brought higher education to the democratized Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries bc, offering those who aspired to political leadership a training in political aretē (the goodness, excellence or virtue required for success in pursuing appropriate ends) or phronēsis (sound judgment or practical wisdom) (see Aretē; Sophists). This form of education suggested that most citizens lacked the virtue and judgment required for a life in public affairs, and one can detect a concession to the political dangerousness of this in the claims of Protagoras that cities and their citizens do indeed teach virtue to the young, but that his own teaching could refine and develop it by degrees. In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates exposes the tensions in this view by distinguishing between the habitual virtue of good or obedient citizens, and true virtue which involves intellectual insight and sound judgment (that is, phronēsis), noting that a skill which merely refines and enlarges the former cannot yield the latter.

More generally, the Socratic response to the sophists was above all cautionary. As we encounter Socrates in the Protagoras and other early dialogues of Plato, he dedicated himself to showing through his method of questioning (elenchus) that those who claimed to be teachers of aretē lacked the expert knowledge of it which its teaching would require. The possession of such knowledge would allow one to defend and explain the truths one believes through a reasoned account (aitias logismos), and Socrates denied that he was himself a teacher, apparently on the grounds that he was unable to give such an account of his own beliefs. He advocated the individual care of one’s own soul, and embraced an ethic of justice, wisdom and self-restraint, in opposition to the competitive ethic of the warrior heroes portrayed by Homer and embraced by Greek popular morality. How far he thought his own elenctic method would carry one in this care of the soul, or in the search for the best way to live, is unclear (see Socrates).