The Idea of Virtue as the Gateway to the Truth

Socirates is not really the first philosopher. Thet were ugt philosophers before him. It's just that academics have categorized them as being more similar to religious figures than true philosophers, whatever that might mean. But anyway, the earliest pre socratic philosopher was thales, who argued everything was made of a more basic element. In his case, he argued, everything's water. So objects and beings as they appear to us, are quite literally, reformulations or rarefied forms of water. And so this idea of the world as it really is, not being as it appears, is not limited to plato, but plato, unlike all these other figures, h