1001Philosophers

Aristotle vs Socrates

Aristotle and Socrates are two of the three foundational figures of Western philosophy, with Plato as the bridge between them. Aristotle never met Socrates — Socrates died fifteen years before Aristotle was born — but Aristotle inherited the Socratic project through his two decades of study at Plato's Academy.

At a glance

AristotleSocrates
Dates384 BC – 322 BC470 BC – 399 BC
NationalityGreekGreek
EraAncientAncient
Movements Peripatetic School, Ancient Greek Philosophy Ancient Greek Philosophy
Profile Aristotle → Socrates →

Where they agree

Both held that the central question of philosophy is how a human being should live, both treated virtue as a kind of knowledge or skilled judgment, and both rejected the rhetorical and persuasion-based ethics of the sophists. Both treated philosophical inquiry as inseparable from the political community.

Where they disagree

Socrates was a relentless questioner whose philosophy proceeded by elenchus — exposing the contradictions in his interlocutors' beliefs about virtue without putting forward a positive doctrine of his own. Aristotle's philosophy is the systematic doctrine Socrates resisted: detailed taxonomies of the virtues, a metaphysical biology of the soul, and a theory of practical reason that distinguishes the deliberative from the contemplative life. Where Socrates wrote nothing and disclaimed knowledge, Aristotle wrote treatises on every philosophical subject and produced a body of work that aimed at definitive systematic statement. The contrast captures the tension between philosophy as inquiry and philosophy as theory.

Representative quotes

Aristotle

  • “All men by nature desire to know.”

    Metaphysics Book I, 980a.21 : Opening paragraph of Metaphysics | Variant: All men by nature desire knowledge. | The first sentence is in the Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (2005), 21:10

  • “Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.”

    A friend is one soul abiding in two bodies.

  • “The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”

    Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

Socrates

  • “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”

    Variant: The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance. | Socrates II: xxxi . Original Greek: ἓν μόνον ἀγαθὸν εἶναι, τὴν ἐπιστήμην, καὶ ἓν μόνον κακόν, τὴν ἀμαθίαν

  • “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”

    Plato, Phaedo 115e

  • “I only wish that wisdom were the kind of thing that flowed ... from the vessel that was full to the one that was empty.”

    Plato , Symposium , 175d

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