What Effects Have Socrates, Plato and Aristotle Had on our Lives?

Take away Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and you take away the starting point of 2,500 years of Western philosophy. Imagine a possible world where philosophy met a dead end and the early speculations of the Pre-Socratic philosophers were buried and forgotten. Or imagine a possible world where philosophy started out on an altogether different basis from the Socratic method, or the theories of Plato and Aristotle.

One can imagine these things in the abstract, the problem is that, as an armchair philosopher, it is simply impossible to subtract the influence on one's whole way of thinking that these historical facts represent, or imagine how one might have thought differently. Philosophers are always trying to think differently, trying to break out of the confines of starting points and assumptions. The difficulty is that one can never know how far one has succeeded, in the face of the suspicion that, given the historical point that we have actually started from, there may be ways of thinking that are impossible for us to comprehend.

Or we could be asking how important the influence of 2,500 years of Western philosophy has been in the West. Undoubtedly, philosophical views are deeply ingrained in our culture. It is also true that over the last 150 years the increasing confinement of philosophical activity within the academic departments of universities has led to a situation where philosophy, as a branch of human inquiry, has had decreasing influence on our lives. Not so very long ago, a person who had not studied philosophy was considered uneducated. How little that is true today.