According to Peter Kreeft, Socrates and Descartes are perhaps the two most important philosophers who have ever lived, because they are the two who made the most difference to all philosophers after them. These two fathers of philosophy stand at the beginning of the two basic philosophical options: the classical and the modern. Through an imagined dialogue between Socrates and Descartes, Kreeft focuses on seven features that unite these two major philosophers and distinguish them from all others.
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“We ancients thought that happiness, or the greatest good, consisted in conforming the human soul to objective reality” (Page 76)
“Third, each made the quest for the knowledge of the self the central philosophical quest” (Page 12)
“First, each was an initiator, a revolutionary, virtually without predecessors.” (Page 11)
“Technological knowledge perfects material things in nature that we use: things like water wheels, ships, or cooking stoves. Moral knowledge perfects something much more important and much more intimate to us, more close to home, so to speak, namely, our very actions, our lives. That is why it is more important than technology: because our lives are more important than the lives of ships or pots.” (Page 226)
“Our essence itself—which you yourself locate in thought. Speculative knowledge perfects our mind, enlarges the mind, which is even more intimate and interior than our actions.” (Page 226)