My last week’s blog on Joseph TMK and Chinese culture got me back on the track on my studies of East & West culture, East & West thinking and their founding philosophies. Over the last few days, after a brief discussion with a reader of my blog, I was prompted to go back to my memories to revisit my observations of the similarities and differences of the East & West. It definitely helps to write down my thoughts to crystallize them.

These steps recall me of my teenage years when hungry for learning and knowledge; I enrolled to a philosophy introduction course given by Jesuits fathers at Centre St Ignace in Rose hill. For weeks on, I religiously attended the Saturday lectures and studied with all my might to increase my knowledge of the subject. These efforts in a way opened up my curiosity & brain and gave me this impetus to keep on learning. Ever since, I stayed a keen learner.

I recall the lectures of Father de Roton on Socrates and Plato who were the forefathers of Philosophy and how they founded the western mode of thinking.

The last few days then I went back to my books to read up about both Socrates and Plato to refresh my memory. Socrates himself although a great teacher did not hand over any writings, his immense contributions were through the works of his disciplines Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle and Aristophanes.

Perhaps his most important contribution to Western thought is his dialectic method of inquiry, known as the Socratic Method or method of elenchus, which he largely applied to the examination of key moral concepts such as the Good and Justice. It was first described by Plato in the Socratic Dialogues. To solve a problem, you would ask a question and when finding the answer, you would also have an answer to your problem. This led to the beginning of the Scientific Method, in which the first step says to name the problem in the form of a question. For this, Socrates is customarily regarded as the father of political philosophy and ethics or moral philosophy and as a fountainhead of all the main themes in Western philosophy in general.

Could we teach the Socratic Method to our youth of today? Could we bring Socrates and Plato back to life for our population of Mauritius?  I would wish that the authorities of Education in Mauritius could hear me.