The School of Athens
Let me begin by stressing that I am absolutely not an expert on art in any respect. In fact, my knowledge of art history is well below average. There have been many times when someone has mentioned an historic famous artist, and I embarrassingly had to admit that I didn’t know who they were. But as I’ve gotten older and stepped away from academia, I left feeling inadequate and I find myself still in the pursuit of knowledge. One main focus of my self-learning has been in the area of philosophy, a subject that I had absolutely no exposure to in all my years of formal education.
The word philosophy comes from ancient Greek Philosophia: Philo — meaning to love, and sofos — which means knowledge. This, therefore, seemed like an appropriate place to start in my autodidact pursuits.
As I began, I had to really start from the very beginning, with the first philosophers, being Thales and his school Milesian school where he taught the likes of Anaximander. This lead me to Heraclitus, who fascinated me, not for his ideas, more for his unprecedented opposition to the Milesians, and Pythagoras, whose name we most commonly know for being attributed to the Pythagorean theorem in mathematics.
As I followed the timeline, I came to Socrates and who revolutionized the field so significantly that now everyone that preceded him is thrown into a category that we now call the…
