Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life

by Agnes Callard Narrated by Agnes Callard

Overview

An iconoclastic philosopher revives Socrates for our time, showing how we can answer-and, in the first place, ask-life's most important questions.

Socrates has been hiding in plain sight. We call him the father of Western philosophy, but what exactly are his philosophical views? He is famous for his humility, but readers often find him arrogant and condescending. We parrot his claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” yet take no steps to live examined ones. We know that he was tried, convicted, and executed for “corrupting the youth,” but freely assign Socratic dialogues to today's youths, to introduce them to philosophy. We've lost sight of what made him so dangerous. In Open Socrates, acclaimed philosopher Agnes Callard recovers the radical move at the center of Socrates' thought, and shows why it is still the way to a good life.

Callard draws our attention to Socrates' startling discovery that we don't know how to ask ourselves the most important questions-about how we should live, and how we might change. Before a person even has a chance to reflect, their bodily desires or the forces of social conformity have already answered on their behalf. To ask the most important questions, we need help. Callard argues that the true ambition of the famous “Socratic method” is to reveal what one human being can be to another. You can use another person in many ways-for survival, for pleasure, for comfort-but you are engaging them to the fullest when you call on them to help answer your questions and challenge your answers.

Callard shows that Socrates' method allows us to make progress in thinking about how to manage romantic love, how to confront one's own death, and how to approach politics. In the process, she gives us nothing less than a new ethics to live by.

Editorial Reviews

Merve Emre

"It is un-Socratic to praise a book that teaches us to be skeptical of praise or any settled judgment. Open Socrates is a work of the deepest intellectual integrity. Agnes Callard does not seek our agreement or approval. She encourages us to live life by questioning everything, even—or especially—her own words."

Rachana Kamtekar

"Open Socrates will keep you up at night thinking about thinking: what makes it so hard to think about the questions we most deeply care about and how can we make progress? Drawing on thinkers as diverse as Leo Tolstoy and William James and William Clifford to sharpen the difficulties, Agnes Callard describes how Plato’s Socrates practiced a kind of open-to-refutation joint inquiry into questions on which our actions and lives depend, and applies this Socratic approach to questions of politics, love, and death. The resulting discussions are chock-full of surprises and insights. Callard is the Socrates of our times."

New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

"[Callard] is so earnestly excited by her subject that even a skeptical reader is bound to feel a swell of enthusiasm as she makes her full-throated case for a life of the mind…charming, intelligent…Open Socrates encourages us to recognize how little we know, and to start thinking."

Marginal Revolution - Tyler Cowen

"This is the latest—and the best in a long time—case for leading a philosophic life, which…will start a whole new and much needed dialogue on what a philosophic life really means."

John Ferrari

"Agnes Callard gives us a brilliant and vivid account of what a truly philosophic life could be. Her Socrates is a magnificent figure: uncompromisingly open, brave enough to live life without foundations and to pursue truth at all costs, yet no loner, but a man convinced that thinking is something we must do together. The book is both a challenge and an inspiration."

The Washington Post - Quill Kula

"Open Socrates is lively and clever. It brings the persona of Socrates to life, painting a vivid picture of a gripping character with friendships, values and passions."

Psychology Today - Glenn C. Altschuler

"Callard’s accessible and immensely insightful book should command the attention of armchair and professional psychologists and philosophers."

The Spectator World - Stuart Jeffries

"[S]uperb…the most gripping new philosophical book I’ve read in years…teems with insights into our world…The great virtue of the book is that the author makes this ugly old Athenian shock us anew with his insights into the things that really matter but that we are fearful of addressing—how to live, love and die. In each case she suggests that we moderns are doing them all wrong."

Ian Leslie

"Agnes Callard has a remarkable gift for making ancient philosophy feel modern, urgent, and electrifyingly alive. In her hands, Socrates and Plato aren’t distant figures but conversation partners pushing us to think through the deepest and most important questions of our lives."

New Yorker - Joshua Rothman

"Socrates, Callard argues, inaugurated a whole way of life—a new way of being a person. It’s possible not just to employ the Socratic method, in other words, but to live by it. Doing this entails allowing yourself to be questioned about the basic ideas through which you’ve organized your existence…Reading Callard’s book, I thought back to some of my own Socratic experiences. I was struck by the fact that I could remember so many of them; even years later, they stood out as remarkable. When was the last time I had that kind of conversation, and with whom? That’s a question potent enough to make you change how you spend your time."

Judith Butler

"In this brilliant and probing book, Agnes Callard thinks with and about Socrates, renewing his philosophy for the present by inviting her audience to become philosophical with her. For Callard, to become philosophical is to value intellectual life, to cultivate inquisitiveness, and to be open to arguments that make you rethink what you know, or to think about what you know for the first time… In the place of a Socrates we may associate with perpetual irony and clever domination there emerges a philosopher of love who brings the practice of living and the mindful preparation for dying into a challenging conversation. Callard gives us a Socrates for the present in a book in which openness is its theme and manner. This book delivers the gift of thought as an open and beautiful invitation."

Kirkus Reviews

2024-10-12
How to open one’s mind.

Philosopher Callard proposes a way of thinking and living that “promises to make people freer and more equal; more courageous; and more romantic” by turning to Socratic method and ethics. Socrates, she asserts, leads us to focus on “untimely questions”: questions that are hard to ask because we think we already know the answer. Those answers are not the result of real probing but rather, according to Socrates, are shaped by the “savage commands” of bodily appetites and kinship that affect what we do, think, and feel. The Socratic method transcends these commands by defining inquiry as social and communal, a conversation between individuals, one of whom is pursuing truth, the other trying to avoid error. It’s a method that entails the “back-and-forth of inquisitive refutation.” In addressing issues such as free speech, egalitarianism, and the fight for social justice, which Callard sees as central to liberal ideology, Socratic ethics offers an alternative to three strains of thought: Kantian ethics, in which actions are constrained by respect for humanity; utilitarianism, which aims to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number; and virtue ethics, whose basic principle is to act like a virtuous person. Socratic ethics, on the other hand, is an ethics of inquiry. “The way to be good when you don’t know how to be good,” according to Socrates, “is by learning.” Callard addresses several paradoxes that arise from the Socratic method, as well as how Socratizing helps us to think about politics, love, and death. “The inquiry into untimely questions,” Callard asserts, “is the search for a life that doesn’t need to be shielded from reflection, a life you liveby understanding it.”

An illuminating, densely argued philosophical analysis.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178690758
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	02/11/2025
Edition description:	Unabridged
Sales rank:	1,061,680

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