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Introduction Socrates likened himself to a midwife—not of bodies, but of minds. As the son of Phaenarete, a literal midwife, he inherited her art in metaphorical form, calling it maieutic technē , the midwifery of ideas. His role, he insisted, was not to implant wisdom but to assist others in giving birth to what lay dormant within them. Today, interacting with large language models (LLMs) curiously echoes this ancient method. The AI does not hold fixed truths ready to be retrieved like files in an archive; rather, it responds to how it is prompted, shaped, and questioned. Just as Socrates insisted that truth must be drawn out through skillful dialogue, meaningful engagement with AI hinges not on what we ask, but how we ask it. In this sense, the modern “prompt engineer” becomes a kind of digital midwife—an interpreter and interrogator whose task is not mere extraction, but elicitation. Socrates and the Midwife of Ideas In Plato’s Theaetetus , Socrates describes his peculiar p...

AI art Introduction In today’s consumer-driven society, where the market seems to manufacture desires as rapidly as it satisfies them, the distinction between what we need and what we desire has become increasingly elusive. Yet this is not a new dilemma. Classical Greek philosophers—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—devoted careful thought to the nature of human wants, drawing a sharp ethical and philosophical boundary between finite needs and infinite desires . This article examines how each of these thinkers approached the problem, exploring their metaphors, arguments, and distinctions, and how their insights might still illuminate our lives today. Socrates and the Leaky Jar of Insatiable Desire In Plato’s Gorgias , Socrates delivers one of the most vivid critiques of unrestrained desire through a memorable analogy. He compares the undisciplined soul to a jar riddled with holes, forever leaking whatever is poured into it. This image is offered during a debate with Callicles, ...