The Socratic problem results from the inability to determine what, in the writings of Plato, is an accurate portrayal of Socrates' thought and what is the thought of Plato with Socrates as a literary device. Socrates, often credited with founding philosophy and who was put to death by the democracy of Athens in May, 399 BC, was Plato's teacher and mentor; Plato, like some of his contemporaries, wrote dialogues about his departed teacher.

Most of what we know about Socrates comes from the writings of Plato; however, it is widely believed that only some of Plato's dialogues are verbatim accounts of conversations or unmediated representations of Socrates' thought. Many of the dialogues seem to use Socrates as a device for Plato's thought, and inconsistencies occasionally crop up between Plato and the other accounts of Socrates; for instance, Plato has Socrates constantly denying that he would ever accept money for teaching, while Xenophon's Symposium clearly has Socrates stating that he is paid by students to teach wisdom and this is what he does for a living. Given the apparent evolution of thought in Plato's dialogues from his early years to his middle and later years, it is often believed that the dialogues began to represent less of Socrates and more of Plato as time went on. However, the question of exactly what aspects of Plato's dialogues are representative of Socrates and what are not is far from agreed upon.

Karl Popper treats the Socratic problem in his first book of The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).

Friedrich Schleiermacher whose translation of Plato into German still stands undisputed in Germany, actually seems to have solved the so-called "Socratic problem." Schleiermacher maintains that the two dialogues Apology and Crito are rather accurate historical portrayals of the real man, Socrates - and, hence, history and not Platonic philosophy at all! All of the other dialogues that Schleiermacher accepted as genuine, he considered to be integrally bound together and consistent. Their consistency is related into the three phases of Plato's development (1) Foundation works - culminating in Parmenides;(2) Transitional works - culminating in two so called families the first being the three dialogues (a) Sophist, Statesman and Symposium and the second being (b) Phaedo and Philebus; finally (3) Constructive works: Republic, Timaeus and Laws. In Scheiermacher's view the "Stranger" fulfills a critical function in Plato's development as he appears in the first family above as the "Eleatic Stranger" in the first two, and the "Manitenean Stranger" in the Symposium. The "Athenian Stranger" is the main character of Plato's Laws. Also, the triad: Sophist-Statesman-Philosopher makes particularly good sense in this order as Schleiermacher also maintains that the two dialogues, Symposium and Phaedo show Socrates as the quintessential PHILOSOPHER in life (guided by Diotima) and into death, the realm of "otherness." Thus the triad announced both in the Sophist and in the Statesman is completed, though the Philosopher, being divided dialectically into a "Stranger" portion and a "Socrates" portion, isn't called "The Philosopher" - this philosophical gem, simply, is left to the reader to figure out.

Thus, although solving the Socratic problem, a more fundamental problem appears: understanding the dialectics between the "Stranger" and "Socrates." In that there still is no agreed upon consensus as to the relationship(s) between the most central dialogues: Parmenides, Theaetetus, Meno,Symposium, Republic and Laws - there are problems aplenty into which one may plunge.

Classical Greek philosophy