Historical Socrates problem

[ficino]

The problem of the Historical Socrates is somewhat analogous to the problem of the Historical Jesus. The sources for Socrates' life and teachings are, as a group, more reliable than those for Jesus' life and teachings, because they include texts written during or just after Socrates' life, and they include hostile as well as laudatory sources. Still, since Socrates did not leave any writings, we have to do a job of reconstruction.

Here is a good review of the state of the question by David Wolfsdorf of Temple Univ.

http://astro.temple.edu/~dwolfsdo/The%2 ... web%29.pdf

A discussion more squarely focused on sources and methodology is by Louis-Andre Dorion in the Cambridge Companion to Socrates. Only some of his paper, however, is accessible via Google.books:

https://books.google.com/books?id=_KBex ... &q&f=false

[Stephan Huller]

It is interesting that the use of 'heresy' assumes that the various Christian groups developed from Jesus (presumably) in the manner that the various 'sects' did from Socrates. I can't help that anyone who used the word 'αἵρεσις' to describe a branch of Christianity assumed it had a historical 'teacher' as it's founder. Unless Jesus the angel was a teacher or Paul?

[Peter Kirby]

Fortunately, as much as Socrates is a figure of popular interest, the cultural freight he bears is nowhere near comparable to that of (our perennial subject here) Jesus. It should be possible to get real consensus on the bare basics, including his historicity, I assume.

[ficino]

Yes, I think, on "bare basics" of his bio, but hard to reach consensus on details of his philosophy. For starters, whether he had a unified "philosophy."