Open Socrates by Agnes Callard

Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life

By Anges Callard

WW Norton 2025

Agnes Callard is a professor of philosophy, and her new book, Open Socrates, is provocatively subtitled “The Case for a Philosophical Life,” hence a kind of manifesto, although thankfully she’s both a first-rate prose stylist and willing to work in shades of the personal and the dramatic, so the experience isn’t as dreary as most manifestos tend to be.

Which would ordinarily clear the runway for a vigorous and clear-sighted examination of a subject, but since the subject here is philosophy, that’s unlikely. Callard writes that the philosophical life involves dealing with what she calls “untimely questions,” which are “marked by the fact that we need answers to them before we are prepared to ask them.” In her view, poor groping humans only have “default” answers “absent philosophizing” to these kinds of untimely questions. Absent philosophizing, we’re stuck with unreliable sources, personal biases, old prejudices, logical fallacies, a mess of blunt, primordial instruments that can’t possibly be effective in answering untimely questions.

Anyone familiar with philosophy will know what to expect at this point: the posing of questions so simple a toddler instantly knows their answers, then the torturing of language and logic to obscure those answers. Callard reels off some untimely questions, like “Why seek material prosperity? Why educate my children? Why care about the welfare of the people? Why does literary fame matter?” And right while you’re answering, “Material prosperity creates comfort and security; educating children increases their chances of greater comfort and security; you value the welfare of the people because you’re one of the people and value your own welfare; literary fame is one of the only ways for a person to be remembered long after they’re dead,” she’s unfolding the heavy leathern covers of her dreaded instruments, ready to go to work on these brick-obvious questions until they start to look like the Riemann Hypothesis. 400 pages of good prose won’t make these questions even mildly tardy, much less untimely, nor would 4000. But off we go.

“What is the difference between sadness and anger?” she asks.

That is an example of the kind of question that I see as paradigmatically philosophical. We feel viscerally that there is a big difference, and that it has been staring us in the face all our lives; we would readily describe ourselves as knowing that and how they are different. We might even find ourselves echoing Meno: “It is not hard to tell you” what this difference is, in fact, “it is easy to say,” and the difference between sadness and anger is “not difficult to describe,” so that “one is not at a loss to say what it is.” But after we got through the speech, what would we actually say?

As the philosopher at last falls briefly silent once that question’s asked, there’s no point in simply using the English language and common emotional experience going back 500,000 years to explain, as to a toddler, the clear and easy, easy, easy difference between sadness and anger, because, well, read that long quote again. Feel the slight queasiness of vertigo by the time you reach the end of it? That slight murmur of wondering … what was the question again?

The lucky counterpart to all this customary philosophical twaddle becomes clear when we move from the book’s subtitle to its actual title: Callard is a fresh and marvelously spirited companion when reading Socrates in the works of Plato (drawn from a variety of English-language translations not the author’s own), garlanded everywhere by a wonderful variety of literary allusions. This kind of energetic, irresistible explication is the essence of good teaching, and if Open Socrates is any indication, Callard is one fantastic teacher.

As to the epistemic validity of the various axiomata propose … what was the question again?

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News