Six qustions of Socrates

Recently picked up a copy of the book “Six Questions of Socrates” by Christopher Phillips. The book starts off provocatively and promises to be a decent non-fiction read.

Loyal to the title, the book is about a set of six questions that Socrates practiced asking everywhere he went: “…What is virtue? What is moderation? What is courage? What is justice? What is piety? What is good?”.

While it is an interesting set of questions to ask, it strikes me as a wrongful, and typically western approach to philosophy. This questionnaire like approach is somewhat similar to what we see today in Cosmopolitan journals, various focus groups, dating services, and intelligence qualifying test. It is an approach that tries to quantify the unquantifiable.

According to the book some see this set of questions as what defines a human, or “What is human kind capable of?”.

What a piety. It’s been two and a half millennia since Socrates and we are still trying to find formula to every aspect of life. The six are poetic questions while the answers are taken as bases to precision(Precisionism?)?. The set, in my opinion, isn’t finite, and neither could the answers ever be. How can one know of formula to what is, in respect to them, an eccentric entity?

This six questions of Socrates are great exercises for the mind but are taken a little to literally by some(Laszlo Versenyi, and author)

Please correct me if I’m wrong.