Soren Kierkegaard once remarked that we can never be reminded too often that a man existed named Socrates. Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates thus comes as a particularly timely reminder. Callard is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, focusing on ancient philosophy and ethics. Due to what’s called the “linguistic turn,” academic philosophy can often feel like a boring exercise in analyzing terminology and quibbling about what people are allowed to talk about. Callard breaks this mold. She is distinguished in her field by being interested in philosophy that is practical and humanly valuable; she is very much in touch with what gets people interested in philosophy in the first place—a desire to understand how to live, to find answers to the big questions, to solve the meaning of life.
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