Best Things in Life

A Contemporary Socrates Looks at Power, Pleasure, Truth and the Good Life

What are the best things in life? What is the purpose of education? What is the good of money? Is there a difference between Capitalism and Communism? Is belief in God like belief in Santa Claus? Is there really a right and a wrong or is everything just subjective? Questions like these boggle our minds—but they don't boggle Socrates!

What would happen if the indomitable old Greek suddenly awoke and brought his unending questions to the campus of Desperate State University? Peter Kreeft imagines that if he came he would bring the same mind-opening and spirit-stretching challenges that disrupted ancient Athens. This book presents twelve short and highly readable dialogues between Socrates and two modern college students. These amusing, rousing, and instructing conversations explode contemporary values like success, power, and pleasure. The resurrected Socrates bursts the modern bubbles of agnosticism and subjectivism, leaving us richer, wiser, and more able to discern what the best things in life actually are.

Table of Contents:

1. I. Socrates and Peter Pragma
2. On Education and E.T.
3. On Liberal Education and Careers
4. On Technology and Inchworms
5. On Artificial Intelligence and College Presidents
6. On Superstition and Santa Claus
7. On Success and the Greatest Good
8. II. Socrates and Felicia Flake
9. On Pot and Happiness
10. On Rock... and Music
11. On Sex and Love
12. On Sexism and Pop Psychology
13. On Communism and Capitalism
14. Interlude before Felicia's Oxford Tutorial
15. On Objective Values