Americans Could Learn From Socrates

Most of us who studied philosophy when we were young think of Socrates as the guy who questions everything in Plato’s Dialogues. For a long time I suspected that if I had attended a dinner party in Athens at which he was present, I would have found him annoying.

During the dark days of the pandemic, I read about the plague that struck Athens in 430 BC, when the city state was under siege by Sparta during the Peloponnesian War.

Over the following three years, most of the population was infected, ...