Open Socrates

”[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.” – Jennifer Szalai - New York Times“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.” – Joshua Rothman - New Yorker“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.” – Quill Kula - The Washington Post“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.” – Tyler Cowen - Marginal Revolution“Callard’s accessible and immensely insightful book should command the attention of armchair and professional psychologists and philosophers.” – Glenn C. Altschuler - Psychology Today”[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.” – Stuart Jeffries - The Spectator World“How does one move away from ignorance and toward knowledge? For Callard’s Socrates, there is only one way: unceasing, open-minded inquiry into seemingly simple questions in conversation with others.” – Natasha O’Neill, digital line editor - Vanity Fair“Open Socrates …inspires us to live more philosophically; it pushes us to think about how to live a life defined by actual principles that we reflectively endorse and not simply the most expedient rationalizations that occur to us in any given situation.” – Olúfémi O. Táíwò - The Nation“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.” – Judith Butler“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.” – John Ferrari, Berkeley“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.” – Ian Leslie, author of How to Disagree“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.” – Rachana Kamtekar, Cornell University author of Plato’s Moral Psychology“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.” – Merve Emre, New Yorker contributing writer and editor of The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway

Agnes Callard is an American philosopher and an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. She has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, Point, and others. She lives in Chicago.