At the beginning of Laches, Socrates, Laches, Nicias, Melesias, and Lysiamachus gather to discuss whether the sons of Melesias and Lysiamachus should learn to fight in armor. Socrates argues that Melesias and Lysiamachus are truly concerned with "the question in which virtue might be added to the souls of their children to make them better" (190b). The first step in developing an answer to this question is to determine what exactly virtue is (190c). Socrates, however, thinks that trying to determine what virtue is might be "too great a task", so he suggests that they first see whether or not any of them have knowledge of some part of virtue and, since the goal is to determine whether or not the sons of Melesias and Lysiamachus should fight in armor, Socrates decides that the part of virtue they investigate should be courage (190d). Socrates provides the following reasoning in response to Nicias' argument that courage is knowledge of the fearful: Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Courage is the knowledge of those who are afraid (195a) Courage is a part of virtue. (198a) Fear is the expectation of future evil. (198b) Knowledge of future evil is the same as knowledge of present and past evil. (198d) Courage, then, is knowledge of past, present, and future evil. (199c) Anyone who has knowledge of past, present, and future evil could not possibly lack courage, temperance, justice, or any other part of virtue. (199e) Knowledge of past, present, and future evil describes the whole virtue, not just a single part of it. (199e) Courage is not knowledge of fearful things. Socrates begins by defining fear: «fear is not produced by evils that have happened or are happening, but by those that are foreseen. Because fear is the expectation of a future evil" (198b). In other words, when we are afraid, it is because we anticipate that something bad will happen to us in the future. Along the same lines, fear of something means expecting that that thing will make something bad happen to you in the future. If a person is afraid of a roller coaster, then that person expects that something bad will happen to him if he gets on it, perhaps that he will fall. Using this definition of fear, Socrates claims that knowledge of future evil is the same thing as knowledge of future evil. present and past evil. To explain what he means, Socrates says of medicine's relationship to health that "there is no other art linked to the past, present and future except that of medicine" (198d). The important thing to note here is the use of the word “art,” which implies a technical knowledge, a skill, as opposed to factual knowledge. In this view, therefore, one's technical ability does not discern between things that have happened in the past, things that are happening in the present and things that will happen in the future. Knowledge thus conceived makes courage the knowledge of the past, the present and the future. future evil (199c), or "practically all good and evil combined" (199d). Continuing his point, Socrates says, "Then a man with this kind of knowledge seems to depart from virtue in some way if he truly knows, in the case of all goods, what they are, will be, and have been, and similarly in the case of evils ?” (199d) In other words, a person who possesses courage (knowledge of “practically all good and evil combined”) can “deal with both gods and men with respect to both the fearful and its opposite” (199d) and therefore cannot have the deficiencies this would lead to being wrong with respect to virtue. However, if the previous point is true, then Nicias' definition of courage “would not be a part.