This is a book that is charming, intelligent and occasionally annoying ... Despite some of her grander pronouncements, Callard invites us to think alongside her. Open Socrates encourages us to recognize how little we know, and to start thinking.
Lively and clever. It brings the persona of Socrates to life, painting a vivid picture of a gripping character with friendships, values and passions ... Many people simply do not have the time or resources to devote their lives to intellectual thought and conversation. I consider many of their lives valuable and worth living, and I set an extremely high bar — higher than Open Socrates can meet — for an argument to convince me otherwise.
Callard’s book is 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.
Callard is quite right, and her Socratic conclusion is worth internalising ... It seems rather neat that Socrates would reach the same conclusions as rationalist, atheistic, elite-educated philosophers with bohemian lifestyles. One would be forgiven for perhaps finding these conclusions a little self-serving, although, to her credit, Callard is very keen to be questioned and is clearly joyfully up for disagreeing with you: while we might struggle to emulate Socrates all the time, Callard’s book reminds us that we need more philosophy than ever.
Sprightly ... While I admire the oddity of Callard’s identification with Socrates, it’s a dilemma for the book that she comes across as a more appealing figure than Socrates himself, who can seem like kind of a jerk. ... A little antic.
A less serious author would have devoted a great deal of time to establishing how their subject’s ideas might grant us practical advantages when dealing with the minutiae of everyday life. There’s something rather bracing and brilliant about how rapidly Callard sweeps all that off the table ... It’s a shame because, while the content and language are refreshingly free from jargon and by no means heavy or obscure, the cumulative effect of this repetition and rhetorical connective tissue (the same lengthy passage by Tolstoy is repeated, in full, twice) means that many genuinely interesting, useful insights are buried among the clutter.
