How Did Socrates Influence Critical Thinking

There are no direct works from Socrates himself, therefore leading us to depend on the works of those who knew him best. Everything that Socrates believed and thought was, if at all, said verbally to his students and peers. According to The History Channel’s website, Plato, one of Socrates’ best students, stated in his early works that Socrates rarely shared his opinion with others and that he would, instead, question and inquire everything that his students were thinking in order to reach a deeper understanding about what they thought. He was the first philosopher we have on record to take that political philosophy style of thinking and apply it to people and the thought process of humans. Socrates was one of the first if not the first “truth

According to Plato’s Socratic Dialogues, Socrates believed in solving problems by asking a series of questions and that the answer you seek would be a combination of the answers you have come up with through your questions. Socrates first used this as a tool to help his students learn answers for themselves through asking them questions. It was through this process that he created a generation of open-minded philosophers. It is still one of the strongest and oldest thought processes that we use today, we just refer to it as “critical thinking” than we do “The Socratic Method.” This thought process is still taught today in high schools all across the country as well as colleges and universities. It is, however, one of the biggest contributions as to why Socrates was sentenced to death. He was charged with “corrupting the minds of the youth” and sentenced to death by poison. It was not of course the only reason he was sentenced to

This was an idea that was not common during his time and he began to make enemies through thoughts like this. According to records left by his students, he was the first to say something like that. Looking at ancientgreece.com, Socrates said that a person should focus on his/her self developments rather than material things. He said that people should develop friendships and love each other. He also taught that humans have a certain amount of virtue and that we as humans should explore those virtues in order to set a baseline for what we can do to achieve our own happiness. This is what wise people of today preach. We still have this exact same thought process in our society today; we are told to find what we are good at, explore ourselves in order to find what makes us happy, and then find something to do that allows us to utilize our knowledge and skills to provide us with that happiness. Something that caught me by surprise while reading about Socrates is that he did not like