Open Socrates

A gem of a book, serious and clever yet funny and playful

A gem of a book, serious and clever yet funny and playful

Brilliant, compulsive

Open Socrates — quite the most gripping new philosophical book I've read in years — teems with insights into our world

Bracing and brilliant… Socrates offers neither miracle cures nor lifestyle hacks: the road to “epistemological humility”, Callard argues, is long and bumpy. Crucially, it’s a journey we embark on together

Socrates used to say that he knew nothing other than the fact of his own ignorance... Callard invites us to think alongside her. Open Socrates encourages us to recognise how little we know, and to start thinking

While we might struggle to emulate Socrates all the time, Callard’s book reminds us that we need more philosophy than ever. The freedom to disagree as equal partners in an on-going collective effort to understand untimely questions must be defended: there are few higher things

Callard speaks directly to what you might call the Fleabag generation... The fear Fleabag expresses — that you’re somehow living your life all wrong — is shared by millennials and Gen X alike, and Callard’s Socratic vision offers a way out that is not glib, that requires more effort than journaling or posting reels, but that might help people change their thinking

Intellectually challenging and hardly a simple crash course on Socrates, but the payoff is worth the time and effort put into rethinking approaches to philosophy and life

If you’re a fan of Alain de Botton’s The Consolations of Philosophy , Agnes Callard’s look at the ancient Greek’s famous Socratic method will be a hit... Callard explains how putting real effort into intellectual dialogues with the people around us can help us figure out modern life, love and even death

For Callard, philosophy isn’t just her job, or an intellectual exercise. She wants it to be what it was intended as by Socrates: a guide to living a good life

Agnes Callard is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Her primary areas of specialization are ancient philosophy and ethics. She has written for The New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, Boston Review , and penned a monthly column for the Point . From 2019 to 2020, she held a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for the research that contributes to this book.