Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: Did Socrates believe in free will?
In Plato's Gorgias (and in the Protagoras 345c4-e6), Socrates argues that no one does wrong willingly, one of the most famous doctrines to be associated with him. When framed in modern (Western) terms, the implication is that it is ignorance, rather that free individual agency, that is responsible for morally wrong actions.
Socrates, believed to have been born in Athens in the 5th century BCE, marks a watershed in ancient Greek philosophy. Athens was a center of learning, with sophists and philosophers traveling from across Greece to teach rhetoric, astronomy, cosmology, geometry, and the like. The great statesman Pericles was closely associated with this new learning and a friend of Anaxagoras, however, and his political opponents struck at him by taking advantage of a conservative reaction against the philosophers; it became a crime to investigate the things above the heavens or below the earth, subjects considered impious. Anaxagoras is said to have been charged and to have fled into exile when Socrates was about twenty years of age. There is a story that Protagoras, too, was forced to flee and that the Athenians burned his books. Socrates, however, is the only subject recorded as charged under this law, convicted, and sentenced to death in 399 BCE (see Trial of Socrates). In the version of his defense speech presented by Plato, he claims that it is the envy he arouses on account of his being a philosopher that will convict him.
Having been found guilty of corruption and impiety, Socrates and the prosecutor suggested sentences for the punishment of his crimes against the city-state of Athens. Expressing surprise at the few votes required for an acquittal, Socrates joked that he be punished with free meals at the Prytaneum (the city’s sacred hearth), an honour usually held for a benefactor of Athens, and for the victorious athletes of an Olympiad. After that failed suggestion, Socrates then offered to pay a fine of 100 drachmae—one-fifth of his property—which largesse testified to his integrity and poverty as a philosopher. Finally, a fine of 3,000 drachmae was agreed, proposed by Plato, Crito, Critobulus, and Apollodorus, who guaranteed payment—nonetheless, the prosecutor of the trial of Socrates proposed the death penalty for the impious philosopher. (Diogenes Laërtius, 2.42).
Socrates offers four arguments for the soul's immortality:The scene is set in Phlius where Echecrates who, meeting Phaedo, asks for news about the last days of Socrates. Phaedo explains why a delay occurred between his trial and his death, and describes the scene in a prison at Athens on the final day, naming those present. He tells how he had visited Socrates early in the morning with the others. Socrates' wife Xanthippe was there, but was very distressed and Socrates asked that she be taken away. Socrates' relates how, bidden by a recurring dream to "make and cultivate music", he wrote a hymn and then began writing poetry based on Aesop's Fables.
The jurors of the trial voted the guilt of Socrates by a narrow margin (36a). In the "Apology of Socrates", Plato cites no numbers of votes condemning or acquitting the philosopher of the accusations of moral corruption and impiety; although Socrates did say he would have been acquitted if thirty more jurors had voted in his favour. In such cases — where the penalty of death might arise as legal sanction for the accusations presented — Athenian law required that the prosecutor and the defendant each propose an administrative penalty to punish the actions reported in the accusations.
The dialogue takes place in Socrates' prison cell, where he awaits execution. He is visited before dawn by his old friend Crito, who has made arrangements to smuggle Socrates out of prison to the safety of exile. Socrates seems quite willing to await his imminent execution, and so Crito presents as many arguments as he can in order to persuade Socrates to escape. On a practical level, Socrates' death will reflect badly on his friends--people will think they did nothing to try to save him. Also, Socrates should not worry about the risk or the financial cost to his friends; these they are willing to pay, and they have also arranged to find Socrates a pleasant life in exile. On a more ethical level, Crito presents two more pressing arguments: first, if he stayed, he would be aiding his enemies in wronging him unjustly, and would thus be acting unjustly himself; and second, that he would be abandoning his sons and leaving them without a father.
Socrates addresses Clitophon and confronts him on the rumor of Clitophon censuring spending time with Socrates while praising time with Thrasymachus (406a1-a4). Clitophon claims that he heard incorrectly and that while he did not praise some things of Socrates, he did praise others (406a5-a7). Socrates agrees to listen to Clitophon's side so that he might learn how to better himself by allowing himself be subject to Clitophon's criticism (407a1-a5).
The Death of Socrates () is an oil on canvas painted by French painter Jacques-Louis David in 1787. The painting focuses on a classical subject like many of his works from that decade, in this case the story of the execution of Socrates as told by Plato in his "Phaedo". In this story, Socrates has been convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and introducing strange gods, and has been sentenced to die by drinking poison hemlock. Socrates uses his death as a final lesson for his pupils rather than fleeing when the opportunity arises, and faces it calmly. The "Phaedo" depicts the death of Socrates and is also Plato's fourth and last dialogue to detail the philosopher's final days, which is also detailed in "Euthyphro", "Apology", and "Crito".
Socrates was born in Alopeke, and belonged to the tribe Antiochis. His father was Sophroniscus, a sculptor, or stonemason. His mother was a midwife named Phaenarete. Socrates married Xanthippe, who is especially remembered for having an undesirable temperament. She bore for him three sons, Lamprocles, Sophroniscus and Menexenus.
Socrates (c. 436 BC – 401 BC) was a Greek mercenary general from Achaea who traveled to Persia to fight at the Battle of Cunaxa. Xenophon describes him as brave in war and a reliable friend. Socrates was summoned by Cyrus, with whom he was already connected, to bring as many troops as he could muster under the pretense that Cyrus intended to attack Tissaphernes. Socrates had previously been besieging Miletus alongside Pasion the Megarian. Socrates brought Cyrus about 500 Hoplites. Socrates and the other troops were only later told that Cyrus intended to seize the Persian throne from his brother Artaxerxes. Socrates fought at the Battle of Cunaxa and the Greek forces were able to drive the Persians into retreat, but Cyrus and his force faced heavy casualties and Cyrus himself was killed in battle.
Many of the Eastern philosophers worked out their thought in poetical fashion. Some of the important names include:Notable Western philosophical poets include:Some philosophers have undertaken to write philosophy in the form of fiction, including novels and short stories (see separate article on philosophical fiction). This is apparent early on in the literature of philosophy, where philosophers such as Plato wrote dialogues in which fictional or fictionalized characters discuss philosophical subjects; Socrates frequently appears as a protagonist in Plato's dialogues, and the dialogues are one of the prime sources of knowledge about Socrates' teaching, though at this remove it is sometimes hard to distinguish Socrates' actual positions from Plato's own. Numerous early Christian writers, including Augustine, Boethius, and Peter Abelard produced dialogues; several early modern philosophers, such as George Berkeley and David Hume, wrote occasionally in this genre.
René Descartes, with "je pense donc je suis" or "cogito ergo sum" or "I think, therefore I am", argued that "the self" is something that we can know exists with epistemological certainty. Descartes argued further that this knowledge could lead to a proof of the certainty of the existence of God, using the ontological argument that had been formulated first by Anselm of Canterbury.
Scotus gave the lecture, "Lectura" I 39, during 1297–1299 to refute the view that everything is necessary and immutable. He claims that the aim of this lecture has two points ("Lectura" I 39, §31): first, to consider the contingency in what is ("de contingentia in entibus"); second, to consider how God's certain knowledge is compatible with the contingency of things.
Scotus tries to defend the validity of Christian theology against the attack of ancient philosophers. The main argument is unpacked in "Lectura" I 39, §§49–53. Scotus argues that a necessary being (God) is able to have contingent knowledge, and that although this knowledge is contingent, it is not necessarily mutable and temporal by that very fact. 
In "Lectura" I 39 §1, Scotus asks, "whether God has determinate knowledge of things according to every aspect of their existence, as according to being in the future." He presents a counterview which claims that God cannot have determinate knowledge of the future. To support this counterview, Aristotle's "De Interpretatione" IX.
In the following arguments, Scotus does not attempt to contradict Aristotle. He does not affirm or reject the ideas of Aristotle. The only issue he argues against is the proposition that God cannot have determinate knowledge of the future. Scotus appears to try to fully demonstrate that Aristotle's text is not contradictory to the Christian doctrine of God.
Scotus argues that God wills with one single volition ("unica volitione") whatever he wills. God has one volition "ad intra", but this one volition can be related to many opposite things "ad extra". God can simultaneously will one thing at time 1 and the opposite thing at time 2.
There are various possible interpretations of Aristotle's "De Interpretatione" IX. For example, John Buridan (ca. 1300–1362) thought the Scotistic contingency theory was an Aristotelian view. Buridan's judgment is all the more possible because of at least four reasons: (1) Aristotle's "De Interpretatione" IX, 19a23-25 can be interpreted like the Scotistic contingency theory; (2) Scotus himself does not refute Aristotle's "De Interpretatione" IX in "Lectura" I 39 §§49–53; (3) Scotus, rather, tries to formulate his contingency theory with the help of other works of Aristotle in "Lectura" I 39 §§51, 54; (4) Scotus introduces the diachronic feature of God's volition to his contingency theory as well as the synchronic feature.
Descartes refused to accept the authority of previous philosophers. He frequently set his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the "Passions of the Soul", an early modern treatise on emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic "as if no one had written on these matters before". His best known philosophical statement is "I think, therefore I am" (; ), found in "Discourse on the Method" (1637; written in French and Latin) and "Principles of Philosophy" (1644; written in Latin).
The Republic (, Politeia; Latin: Res Publica) is a Socratic dialogue, written by Plato around 380 BC, concerning justice (), the order and character of the just city-state, and the just man. It is Plato's best-known work, and has proven to be one of the world's most influential works of philosophy and political theory, both intellectually and historically.
The primary aim of the dialogue is an attempt to define greed. A friend of Socrates argues that greed is a desire to profit from things of no value, but Socrates replies that no sensible man attempts to profit from worthless things, but inasfar as greed is a desire for profit, then it is a desire for the good, and thus everyone is greedy. The friend of Socrates thinks there is something wrong with Socrates' argument, but cannot say what is wrong with it.
Alexander Socrates Onassis was born at the Harkness Pavilion, a private clinic in New York City's NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital. He was the elder child of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (1906 –1975) and his first wife, Athina Livanos (1929 –1974), herself a daughter of a Greek shipping magnate, Stavros G. Livanos. Onassis was named after his father's uncle, who was hanged by a Turkish military tribunal during their sacking of Smyrna in September 1922. Onassis's sister, Christina, was born in 1950.
During the second half of the first millennium BC, the Ancient Greeks developed differing views on the function of the brain. However, due to the fact that Hippocratic doctors did not practice dissection, because the human body was considered sacred, Greek views of brain function were generally uninformed by anatomical study. It is said that it was the Pythagorean Alcmaeon of Croton (6th and 5th centuries BC) who first considered the brain to be the place where the mind was located. According to ancient authorities, "he believed the seat of sensations is in the brain. This contains the governing faculty. All the senses are connected in some way with the brain; consequently they are incapable of action if the brain is disturbed...the power of the brain to synthesize sensations makes it also the seat of thought: The storing up of perceptions gives memory and belief and when these are stabilized you get knowledge." In the 4th century BC Hippocrates, believed the brain to be the seat of intelligence (based, among others before him, on Alcmaeon's work). During the 4th century BC Aristotle thought that, while the heart was the seat of intelligence, the brain was a cooling mechanism for the blood. He reasoned that humans are more rational than the beasts because, among other reasons, they have a larger brain to cool their hot-bloodedness.
Platonism was originally expressed in the dialogues of Plato, in which the figure of Socrates is used to expound certain doctrines, that may or may not be similar to the thought of the historical Socrates, Plato's master. Plato delivered his lectures at the Academy, a precinct containing a sacred grove outside the walls of Athens. The school continued there long after Plato's death. There were three periods: the Old, Middle, and New Academy. The chief figures in the Old Academy were Speusippus (Plato's nephew), who succeeded him as the head of the school (until 339 BC), and Xenocrates (until 313 BC). Both of them sought to fuse Pythagorean speculations on number with Plato's theory of forms.
Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences () is a philosophical and autobiographical treatise published by René Descartes in 1637. It is best known as the source of the famous quotation ""Je pense, donc je suis"" (English: "I think, therefore I am", or "I am thinking, therefore I exist"), which occurs in Part IV of the work. The similar Latin statement, "Cogito, ergo sum", is found in "Meditations on First Philosophy" (1641) and "Principles of Philosophy" (1644).
Before the first attempt at democratic government, Athens was ruled by a series of archons or chief magistrates, and the Areopagus, made up of ex-archons. The members of these institutions were generally aristocrats who ruled the polis for their own advantage. In 621 BC, Draco codified a set of notoriously harsh laws designed to reinforce aristocratic power over the populace. Still, a growing problem of aristocratic families feuding among themselves to obtain as much power as possible led to a point where most Athenians were subject to harsh treatment and enslavement by the rich and powerful. In the 6th century BC, the Athenian laboring class convinced Plato's ancestor Solon, premier archon at the time, to liberate them and halt the feuding of the aristocracy. What soon followed was a system of chattel slavery involving foreign slaves. Solon then issued reforms that defined citizenship in a way that gave each free resident of Attica a political function: Athenian citizens had the right to participate in assembly meetings. By granting the formerly aristocratic role to every free citizen of Athens who owned property, Solon reshaped the social framework of the city-state. Under these reforms, a council of 400 members (with 100 citizens from each of Athens's four tribes) called the "boule" ran daily affairs and set the political agenda. The Areopagus, which formerly took on this role, remained but subsequently carried on the role of "guardianship of the laws". Another major contribution to democracy was Solon's setting up of an "Ecclesia" or Assembly, which was open to all male citizens. 
Not long afterwards, the nascent democracy was overthrown by the tyrant Peisistratos, but was reinstated after the expulsion of his son, Hippias, in 510. Cleisthenes issued reforms in 508 and 507 BC that undermined the domination of the aristocratic families and connected every Athenian to the city's rule. Cleisthenes formally identified free inhabitants of Attica as citizens of Athens, which gave them power and a role in a sense of civic solidarity. He did this by making the traditional tribes politically irrelevant and instituting ten new tribes, each made up of about three "treaties", each consisting of several "demes". Every male citizen over 18 had to be registered in his deme.
The statement "I know that I know nothing" is often attributed to Socrates, based on a statement in Plato's "Apology". The conventional interpretation of this is that Socrates's wisdom was limited to an awareness of his own ignorance. Socrates considered virtuousness to require or consist of "phronēsis", "thought, sense, judgement, practical wisdom, [and] prudence." Therefore, he believed that wrongdoing and behaviour that was not virtuous resulted from ignorance, and that those who did wrong knew no better.
In "The New Trial of Socrates" (2012), an international panel of ten judges held a mock re-trial of Socrates to resolve the matter of the charges levelled against him by Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon, that: “Socrates is a doer of evil, and corrupter of the youth, and he does not believe in the gods of the state, and he believes in other new divinities of his own”; by split decision, five judges voted “Guilty” and five judges voted “Not guilty”, which acquitted Socrates of corruption of the young and of impiety against the Athenian pantheon. Limiting themselves to the facts of the case against Socrates, the judges did not consider any sentence; the judges who voted the philosopher guilty said that they would not have considered the death penalty for Socrates.
The stylistic differences between the Socratic dialogues the "Apology of Socrates to the Jury", by Xenophon, and the "Apology of Socrates", by Plato, is in the literary descriptions of the philosopher, by the Oracle at Delphi; in Xenophon's dialogue, the Oracle said that there was no man “more free, more just, or more sound of mind” than Socrates; in Plato’s dialogue, the Oracle said that there was no man “wiser” than Socrates. Moreover, the narrative differences in the dialogues indicate that Xenophon avoided direct attribution of “wisdom,” the term suggesting that Socrates was accurately characterized as a natural philosopher and an atheist; as he is portrayed in the comedy "The Clouds" (423 BC), a play by Aristophanes. As portrayed by Xenophon, Socrates does not claim to be wise “from the time when I began to understand spoken words . . . [I] have never left off seeking after and learning every good thing that I could.”
Socrates's opposition to democracy is often denied, and the question is one of the biggest philosophical debates when trying to determine exactly what Socrates believed. The strongest argument of those who claim Socrates did not actually believe in the idea of philosopher kings is that the view is expressed no earlier than Plato's "Republic", which is widely considered one of Plato's "Middle" dialogues and not representative of the historical Socrates's views. Furthermore, according to Plato's "Apology of Socrates", an "early" dialogue, Socrates refused to pursue conventional politics; he often stated he could not look into other's matters or tell people how to live their lives when he did not yet understand how to live his own. He believed he was a philosopher engaged in the pursuit of Truth, and did not claim to know it fully. Socrates's acceptance of his death sentence after his conviction can also be seen to support this view. It is often claimed much of the anti-democratic leanings are from Plato, who was never able to overcome his disgust at what was done to his teacher. In any case, it is clear Socrates thought the rule of the Thirty Tyrants was also objectionable; when called before them to assist in the arrest of a fellow Athenian, Socrates refused and narrowly escaped death before the Tyrants were overthrown. He did, however, fulfill his duty to serve as "Prytanis" when a trial of a group of Generals who presided over a disastrous naval campaign were judged; even then, he maintained an uncompromising attitude, being one of those who refused to proceed in a manner not supported by the laws, despite intense pressure. Judging by his actions, he considered the rule of the Thirty Tyrants less legitimate than the Democratic Senate that sentenced him to death.