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Townsend Center Youtube Livestream

Agnes Callard (University of Chicago) and Judith Butler (Comparative Literature) engage in a conversation inspired by Callard's new book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life (Norton, 2025), which explores how the work of Socrates can be used to ask and answer life’s most important questions.

Socrates, Callard argues, has been hiding in plain sight. We call him the father of Western philosophy, but what exactly are his philosophical views? He is famous for his humility, but readers often find him arrogant and condescending. We parrot his claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” yet take no steps to live examined ones. In Open Socrates, Callard recovers the radical move at the center of Socrates’s thought, and shows why it is still the way to a good life.

Callard draws our attention to Socrates’s startling discovery that we don’t know how to ask ourselves the most important questions — about how we should live, and how we might change. Before a person even has a chance to reflect, their bodily desires or the forces of social conformity have already answered on their behalf. To ask the most important questions, we need help. Callard shows that Socrates’s method allows us to make progress in thinking about how to manage romantic love, how to confront one’s own death, and how to approach politics. In the process, she gives us nothing less than a new ethics to live by.

Agnes Callard is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2019) and has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s, and the Free Press. She received her PhD from Berkeley in 2008.

Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School and formerly the Maxine Elliot Chair in Comparative Literature at Berkeley. She is the founding director of Berkeley's Program in Critical Theory and the author of numerous books on gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, and social and political thought.