"To Daily Converse About Virtue"

"Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good," said Socrates, according to his student Plato, "I am better off than he is -- for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know."This is one of his most famous assertions. Whether it's true or not, can be debated. Self-evidently, he knew more than nothing. My mother used to say, whenever I thought I'd caught her in an inconsistency, "All wise people change their minds." It was a frustrating parry in the same way I imagine Socrates' claim was frustrating to those who sought to debate the famed orator.And he was quite famous in his lifetime, at least in Athens where he spent most of his life. When he was still a relatively young man, Aristophanes' play The Clouds was first performed, portraying Socrates as a ridiculous intellectual clown teaching young people to undermine traditional beliefs. He was sufficiently famous even then that audiences were expected to…