WESTERN CIVILIZATION In today's modern world, much of our own culture's beliefs and morals are directly due to the impact of Socratic philosophy on European thinkers, and therefore our own in the western world. This philosophy, was based upon the thoughts of Socrates, who was an Athenian philosopher and possibly the most enigmatic figure in the entire history of philosophy. To begin, after about 450 B.C., Athens was considered the cultural center of the Greek world, and from then on, Athenian philosophy took a new direction. In the past, the Greek world had experienced ideas presented by the natural philosophers (or pre-Socratic, since they were b