Great Philosophers: Socrates

''If you put me to death,'' Socrates warned his Athenian judges, ''you will not easily find anyone to take my place.'' So indeed it would prove, a single cup of hemlock robbing the western philosophical tradition of the man with best claims to be its founding father.

Yet Socrates'' influence was not so easily to be done away with. His words lovingly recorded by his devoted disciple Plato, his doctr...