The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in philosophy, literature, history, sociology, and related subjects.

The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers is by Eric Weiner, an American journalist.

The TU Library collection includes many other books about Socrates.

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. Socrates wrote no texts, so his ideas are preserved in accounts by his students Plato and Xenophon. These accounts are written as dialogues, in which Socrates and others think about a subject in question and answer form.

The Siamese rhinoceros beetle or fighting beetle, a species of large scarab beetle known for its role in insect fighting in Thailand, was apparently named in honor of Socrates by a German entomologist in 1864 who called it Xylotrupes socrates.

The Socrates Express is a popular look at the benefits of philosophy.

Mr. Weiner wrote in 2020:

Philosophy for a Time of Crisis

From Socrates to Camus, thinkers have asked how to respond when adversity turns our lives upside down

Thanks to the pandemic and its economic fallout, we are all philosophers now. The “slow cure,” as philosophy has been called, is exactly what we need. This is philosophy not as metaphysical musing but as originally conceived by the ancient Greeks: practical, therapeutic medicine for the soul.

Philosophy helps us to untangle the knotty ethical questions raised by the pandemic, but it can also help us to answer far more personal but equally urgent quandaries. How to endure the unendurable? How to find certainty in an uncertain universe? Philosophy provides no easy answers, but it reframes our questions and alters our perspectives—a skill that is helpful during good times and invaluable during bad ones.

Philosophy is well acquainted with bad times. Many of history’s greatest thinkers did their most lasting work during pandemics, economic upheaval and social unrest. Theirs is an earned wisdom—and a portable one. Unlike information or technology, wisdom is never rendered obsolete. Philosophy’s insights are more relevant than ever.

Covid-19 has humbled us, unmoored us. Nothing seems certain anymore. Good, Socrates would say. Western philosophy’s patron saint and first martyr would surely recognize our plight. He lived during Athens’ decline as a great power, a fall accelerated by military adventurism and the bubonic plague.

Yet Socrates saw opportunity in his troubled times. He buttonholed revered Athenians, from poets to generals, and soon discovered that they weren’t as wise as they thought they were. The general couldn’t tell him what courage is; the poet couldn’t define poetry. Everywhere he turned, he encountered people who “do not know the things that they do not know.”

Likewise, today’s lockdowns (partial or full) force us to pause and question assumptions so deeply ingrained that we didn’t know we had them. This, said Socrates, is how wisdom takes root. We crave a return to “normal,” but have we stopped to define normal? We know these times demand courage, but what does courage look like? Already, we’ve expanded our notion of “hero” to include not only doctors and nurses but grocery clerks and Grubhub couriers. Good, Socrates would say: Now interrogate other “givens.”

In 19th-century America, Henry David Thoreau leveraged his troubled times—a country marching toward civil war—to find beauty in the imperfect. Gazing at Walden Pond one calm September afternoon, he noticed that the water was marred by motes speckling the surface. Where others might see blemishes, Thoreau saw something “pure and beautiful like the imperfections in glass.”

He observed Walden from various vantage points: from a hilltop, on its shores, underwater, by daylight and moonlight. He would even bend over and peer through his legs, marveling at the beautiful inverted landscape. If you can’t change the world, Thoreau counsels, change how you see it—even if that means contorting yourself. Museums and theaters may be closed, but beauty has not absconded. Viewed at the right angle, said Thoreau, “every storm and every drop in it is a rainbow.”

Michel de Montaigne was an expert contortionist, only it was himself, not ponds, that he yearned to see more clearly. He lived in France in the 16th century, when death was in the air—“gripping us by the throat,” he said. The plague killed nearly half the residents of Bordeaux, where he served as mayor in the 1580s. Grief over the death of his closest friend propelled Montaigne up three winding flights of stairs to the top floor of a red-roofed tower, perched high atop a hill and exposed to the winds, where he penned his brilliant essays. From great suffering, great beauty arises.

Alone in his tower, Montaigne cleaved himself from the world out there and, in a way, from himself too. He took a step back to see himself more clearly, the way that one half-steps away from a mirror. He would advise us to do the same: Use the pandemic as an opportunity to see the world, and yourself, a bit differently. For instance, maybe you have always considered yourself an extrovert but find that you actually enjoy the forced solitude. Welcome this different version of yourself, Montaigne urges.

Stoicism was born of disaster—its founder Zeno established the school of thought in 301 B.C. after he was shipwrecked near Athens—and it has been dispensing advice on coping with adversity ever since. No wonder it’s enjoying a resurgence, one that began before the pandemic.

Stoic philosophy is neatly summed up by the former slave turned teacher Epictetus: “What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgments about things.” Change what you can, accept what you cannot, a formula later adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous and crafty T-shirt hawkers.

A good Stoic would have prepared for the pandemic by practicing premeditatio malorum, or “premeditation of adversity.” Imagine the worst scenarios, advised the Roman senator and Stoic philosopher Seneca, and “rehearse them in your mind: exile, torture, war, shipwreck.” A modern Stoic’s list looks a bit different—a screaming child, unpaid bills, a worrisome fever—but the idea is the same. By contemplating calamity, we rob future hardships of their bite and appreciate what we have now. Adversity anticipated is adversity diminished.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)