Main features:
- he is exclusively an ethical philosopher. Main Question: ‘How should we live?’ Ethics wasn’t really a thing before him. It was mainly Cosmology
- The Socratic Method called Elenchus. This method examines and tests proposals or claims of knowledge by others. It is also essential to Aristotle
- Socratic Ignorance: He doesn’t demonstate or offer proofs of any particular claims himself. He claims that he has no knowledge of how to live. He doesn’t say nobody knows anything. He says nobody really thought through ethics.
- Socrates thinks that since virtue and vice are qualities of the soul and the soul is what a human being truly is, there is no greater duty than to take care of one’s soul.
- In examining the view of others he almost invariably shows them to be ignorant of what they profess to know. he is thus often seen as making mockery out of his interlocutors or, at any rate, employing irony when speaking with them (Socratic Irony) - He’s kinda an asshole