The Art of Living a Meaningless Existence: Ideas from Philosophy That Change the Way You Think

by Robert Pantano

As time passed, Socrates would garner a following of young students interested in his way of thinking. Although he was skeptical of knowledge and popular ideas, he was not without convictions. He taught and made claims about politics, being extremely critical of democracy; he made assessments of values, prioritizing virtue, self-knowledge, goodness, truth, and happiness over wealth, fame, and power; he developed explanations of ethics, believing that evil is always done out of ignorance and harms the doer more than the victim; he defined concepts of the soul; and the list goes on. What is most notable, however, is that, in contrast to the more cosmic focus of the Presocratic thinkers, Socrates maintained that the purpose of philosophy was to answer the very practical, down-to-earth question “What is the way we ought to live?”