Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life
416 pages
|Published: 14 Jan 2025
|Editions
|Details
This edition
ISBN: 9781631498466
Format: Hardcover
Language: English
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date: 14 January 2025
Description
An iconoclastic philosopher revives Socrates for our time, showing how we can answer—and, in the first place, ask—life’s most important questions.
We all know something about Socrates, though we often reduce him to a paragon of mere “critical thinking. ” We think we understand his remark that “the unexamined life is not worth living. ” But in Open Socrates, Agnes Callard—who has emerged as one of our most dazzling and provocative public intellectuals—shows that in fact we understand almost nothing about the Socratic project. Socrates’ radical aim was to force us to confront the assumptions that prop up our lives and our worldviews, and to ask whether those assumptions are correct—or whether they hold us back. True thinking can only happen in a dialogue with another person; only through conversation can we inquire into the fundamental questions of our lives. And only by following Socrates’ model, she demonstrates, can we truly understand politics, love, death, and everything else that matters.
We all know something about Socrates, though we often reduce him to a paragon of mere “critical thinking. ” We think we understand his remark that “the unexamined life is not worth living. ” But in Open Socrates, Agnes Callard—who has emerged as one of our most dazzling and provocative public intellectuals—shows that in fact we understand almost nothing about the Socratic project. Socrates’ radical aim was to force us to confront the assumptions that prop up our lives and our worldviews, and to ask whether those assumptions are correct—or whether they hold us back. True thinking can only happen in a dialogue with another person; only through conversation can we inquire into the fundamental questions of our lives. And only by following Socrates’ model, she demonstrates, can we truly understand politics, love, death, and everything else that matters.
