Socrates Made Athens Question Everything

Lee Braver opens his history of Western ethics at its source: Socrates in ancient Athens. The lecture follows Socrates into the marketplace, where he dismantled confident claims about virtue and drew crowds with his persistent questioning of self-proclaimed experts. Braver then turns to Plato's Euthyphro, a dialogue set outside the courthouse where Socrates is about to face charges of impiety. In conversation with Euthyphro, a man who claims to be an expert on piety, Socrates asks: what is piety? When Euthyphro's first answer fails, Socrates uses the failure to reveal what a real definition of piety requires. It must be universal, applying to every instance. It must guide action, telling us what to do. And it must capture the essence of piety, not just a property of it. Braver argues that these three requirements became the foundation for the form of goodness itself, shaping the major theories of Western ethics this course goes on to examine.