Brooke asked:

Please help me answer this question: Identify and expound upon what effects Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle have had on our lives within the past 50 years.

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You haven't asked for much!

You have obviously been given this as an essay question. I can only guess at what sort of answer
your instructor was expecting.

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 Presocratic 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 a working 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 tryingto 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 you could be asking how importantthe influence of 2,500 years of Western philosophy has been in
the West over the last 50 years. 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.

Geoffrey Klempner