Notes on Excellence part 2

• Initiative to excellence arete defined/ described excellence, moral virtue, fulfillment of purpose or function, but most of all the act of living up to one's full potential
• Arete- some philosophical background 
• Arete involves all of the abilities and potentialities available to humans 
• The highest human potential is knowledge
• Agora- gathering place, assembly, marketplace, center of athletics, spiritual, and political life through city/state
• Polis- political entities ruled by their bodies of citizens, origin of the words politics, metropolitan, poll
• 508 the birth of democracy
• The first time in recorded history a people had resolved against their rulers ever
• Socrates- as a young man he worked as a stonemason, he fought heroically in the Peloponnesian War 
• The way he viewed the world be caused by his working class background and battlefield experiences
• Socrates met with young students in workshops just outside the agora 
• his method ask a series of questions determine their underlying beliefs and the extent of their knowledge this led to the scientific method