For most of us happiness is the overriding aim in life but there is one formidable obstacle to achieving it – few of us have a clear CONCEPTION of what happiness is. For Socrates, a famous Greek philosopher, there was an inextricable link between a person’s well-being and knowledge. You can become truly happy once you have rationally examined every aspect of your life and made sense of the world you live in. Socrates is supposed to have said: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living’. Rational examination of your life is all about CONCEPTS. For example, you have chosen the career of a judge in the hope of promoting justice. Whether your decisions as a judge will make you happy or not will hinge on how clearly you have formulated the CONCEPT of justice. However, the answer to the question ‘What is justice?’ may elude you. What method did Socrates suggest for defining CONCEPTS ? Socrates’s mother was a midwife – she helped women to give birth to babies. Socrates compared
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