Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life
By Agnes Callard
Penguin Books
ISBN: 978-024147619-2
405pp.

We often encounter stories of people confronting life’s most profound questions only when death is near. Several books, written by those diagnosed with terminal illnesses, are filled with advice about what truly matters in life and refer to the prospect of death as a “putter of things in perspective”, as Simon Boas puts it in A Beginner’s Guide to Dying. Yet, to delay such reflection until life’s closing chapter is to put the cart before the horse.

In Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, Agnes Callard, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, challenges the tendency to defer life’s most important questions — such as why we live as we do; what justice and courage are; how we ought to face death. Instead, she advocates for living reflectively and thoughtfully throughout our lives.

We avoid an engagement with fundamental questions because we assume we already possess the answers. Too often, those answers are driven by fleeting impulses of pleasure and pain, or by the social pressure to conform. By relying on those unexamined answers, Callard argues, we fail to ask life’s questions for ourselves and risk living only for “the next fifteen minutes in life.” This leads us to make inconsistent choices at different moments in life and consigns us to “a lifetime of wavering.”

As an alternative, Callard advances neo-Socratic ethics as a guide for navigating life’s complexities. She sets the Socratic approach against the three dominant ethical traditions of Utilitarianism, Kantianism and Aristotelian Virtue Ethics. Each of these traditions resolves moral dilemmas by suggesting adherence to a fixed principle, such as maximising the greatest good of the greatest number, respecting others’ dignity or cultivating character virtues. The Socratic approach offers no specific normative ideals and proposes ‘inquiry’........

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