The Death of Socrates (detail, 1787), Jacques-Louis David - Getty Philosophers are constitutively irritating: this is both their great power and their greatest weakness. Imagine the kind of person ...

For some, it's the last real taste of innocence, and the first real taste of life.

Is the endlessly examined life still worth a look? Given the choice between Socrates dead or alive, Western thinkers have preferred him dead. At least as a symbol. A symbol of what? That’s where it ...

Like the generals he had defended many years before, the manner of his execution was to be the drinking of hemlock. As the hour drew near, everyone in the room broke down and wept except for Socrates ...

Jacque-Louis David's painting depicting the death of Socrates in prison about to drink hemlock given by his executioner. (Wikimedia Commons) In 1928, three years after the famed Scopes Trial over the ...

One of the Metropolitan Museum’s crown jewels, “The Death of Socrates” by Neoclassical master Jacques-Louis David is a magisterial canvas that speaks to the grandeur of noble sacrifice, with clean ...