Aharon explained Socrates as a gadfly who, by prodding and questioning those around him, forced them to reconsider their assumptions. “It upsets the people around him, the people in ancient Greece, to ...

In his conversations, Socrates played the roles of gadfly and midwife. He engaged in sharp, but not adversarial refutation, designed to cure “normative self-blindness.” ...

Ad Policy Illustration by Liam Eisenberg. This article appears in the May 2025 issue. Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates is like many works of philosophy: It is addressed to a certain kind of skeptic ...

Find Your Next Book Thrillers N.Y.C. Literary Guide Nonfiction Summer Preview Advertisement Supported by Nonfiction In “Open Socrates,” the scholar Agnes Callard argues that the ancient Greek ...

Like Socrates, he feels that it is sufficient for a thoughtful man to be a gadfly. * A certain number of Catholic bishops, chiefly auxiliaries, papal diplomats and Curia officials, ...

Callard makes the case that Socrates was not just a gadfly who badgered people with questions, but rather someone who lived by a specific set of values and gave us tools for finding answers to ...

Callard argues that the relentless intellectual pursuit of knowledge and meaning is “the best thing one can do with one’s life.” We should all be “preparing for death,” as Socrates says ...