GREAT PHILOSOPHERS: SOCRATES

'If you put me to death,' Socrates warned his Athenian judges, 'you will not easily find anyone to take my place.' Yet Socrates' influence was not so easily to be erased. His words were recorded by his devoted disciple Plato, and his teachings have survived for twenty-seven centuries. His sense of education as self-discovery and his view of philosophy as preparation for life have been the stuff of western thought at its best.