bigideas

There is a story about Thales, the man who is often, in the West, called the first philosopher. One day, he was walking along, gazing at the heavens, when he fell into a ditch. Crying out, a passing women retorted: You philosophers, who cannot see what is before your feet! Then there is this that was said about Socrates, the person who has become the most famous Western philosopher of all time: he called philosophy down from the heavens, and he did it by talking with others, on the streets, about the things that concerned them from life and love, to shoes and shopping. The stories illustrate the gap between two ways of doing philosophy. A first is perhaps what most people think of when they hear the word philosophy today: it is arid, obscure and disconnected not that they particularly care. But there is second is a kind of philosophy too, the Socratic sort. It is nothing short of a way of life. So the question is how can we practice philosophy as an art of living, who should our inspiration be, and why does it matter.