This is Philosophy Bites with me David Edmonds.

And me, Nigel Warburton.

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Socrates is famous for his challenging philosophical conversations with his Athenian contemporaries.

But can we learn anything from his way of doing philosophy today?

Agnes Callard thinks we can and should.

Agnes Callard, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you. It's great to be back.

We're talking today about lessons from Socrates.

Perhaps you can begin by telling us who Socrates was. Socrates is an ancient Athenian. He lived from

around 469 to 399 BC. And he is famous for walking up to people and asking them foundational questions about their lives,

and the ensuing inquiry is one that people found either thrilling or annoying, maybe sometimes both.

Eventually he got killed for it.

He never wrote anything down.

What are our sources for the type of person he was,

the kind of life he lived? So we have our first source, chronologically, is Aristophanes's Clouds,

which is a comic play that makes fun of Socrates. And Socrates, in fact, thinks that when he's put

to death, it's partly because of the reputation he got as a result of Aristophanes's clouds.

He mentions that in his speech and the apology.

Our second source, well, our next two sources, really, are Plato and Xenophon, who both wrote Socratic dialogues, which is to say things that are like plays, though sometimes they're narrated in the third person, and they are

stories of Socrates in conversation with someone else or with more than one other person.

...