Socrates: The True Father Of Western Mind

Socrates,the philosopher from ancient Athens and arguably the true father of western thought. He is the son of a stonemason, born around 469BC. Socrates was famously odd. In a city that made a cult of physical beauty the philosopher was disturbingly ugly. Socrates taught that beauty and goodness should be determined by usefulness and fitness of function, rather than by mere appearance or personal feelings of delight. Socrates had a pot-belly, a weird walk, swivelling eyes and hairy hands. why should we care about this curious, clever, condemned Greek? Quite simply because Socrates 's problems were our own. He lived in a city that was for the first time working out what role true democracy should play in human society. His hometown – successful,

It didn’t help that he was by all accounts physically ugly, with an upturned nose and bulging eyes. Despite his intellect and connections, he rejected the sort of fame and power that Athenians were expected to strive for. His lifestyle—and eventually his death—embodied his spirit of questioning every assumption about virtue, wisdom and the good life.

Socrates wrote no philosophy, and what we know of him comes chiefly from two of his younger students Xenophon and Plato. They recorded the most significant accounts of Socrates’ life and philosophy. For both, the Socrates that appears bears the mark of the writer.

One of the greatest paradoxes that Socrates helped his students explore was whether weakness of will—doing wrong when you genuinely knew what was right—ever truly existed. He seemed to think otherwise: people only did wrong when at the moment the perceived benefits seemed to outweigh the costs. Thus the development of personal ethics is a matter of mastering what he called “the art of measurement,” correcting the distortions that skew one’s analysis of benefit and