This absorbing discussion with a favorite Firing Line guest ranges from how Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes differ from their great predecessors, to whether Socrates was right to drink the hemlock, to what we know that dogs don't know. Some samples: "Unlike the ancients and the medievalists, who always took into account the views of their predecessors so as to sift the wheat from the chaff, each modern philosopher, from the 17th century on to today, wrote philosophy as if he were the first to write it-started from scratch, paid no attention to the tradition of Western thought at all." "Philosophy begins with a kind of common-sense knowledge of the world, goes beyond that to an understanding of what all common-sense persons with common experience know, and then goes beyond understanding to a small measure of wisdom which we are allowed in this life, not very much, but I think the wise person is the person who makes a proper estimation of the order of things in the right proportion to one another."