The Philosopher Who Still Asks Questions

By Andy — 2026-08-25 — Literary News

I watched someone try to interview a philosopher once. It was painful. They asked compound questions, waited for the answer, then moved on. No real listening. Just boxes to tick.

Agnes Callard would have eaten them alive.

She's the kind of thinker who actually understands what Socrates was doing. Not the watered-down version—not the irony, not the "I know nothing" bit we parrot in high school. She's an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, and last year she published *Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life*, which, as far as I can tell, is basically an argument that nobody's doing this right.

The book makes a simple claim.

Socrates believed that a life devoted to open inquiry was the right course, not only for self-styled intellectuals, but for everyone. That's the thing Callard keeps circling back to. It's not special knowledge. It's not mastery. It's the habit of asking yourself—and others—what the hell you're actually doing with your time.

Recently she appeared on Merve Emre's podcast, *The Critic and Her Publics*, to talk about this. The whole thing is, fittingly, framed around questioning itself. How do you ask something that makes someone think? When do you push, and when do you listen for what's left unsaid? These aren't tricks. They're the oldest skills in philosophy, and also the rarest.

What struck me—actually, that's not quite right. What's interesting is how Callard treats Socratic dialogue as something muscular, something active.

Not a performance.

She describes how Plato's Socrates practiced a kind of open-to-refutation joint inquiry into questions on which our actions and lives depend, and applies this Socratic approach to questions of politics, love, and death. That's the bit that lands. She's not interested in Socrates as a dead guy in a museum. She's interested in what happens when two people actually try to think together about something that matters.

The Socratic method, the way most of us learned it, is this neat thing. Question, answer, gotcha. But Callard's reading is messier. Riskier. You have to admit you don't know. You have to let someone else's thinking change yours. You can't just be clever—you have to be genuinely curious.

Which is why most interviews are disasters.

Most conversations are disasters, come to think of it. We're too busy defending what we already think. Too busy waiting for our turn to talk. Callard's point is that Socrates showed us something else—a way of thinking *with* someone, not *at* them. And that's not optional if you want to live well. It's basic equipment.

The podcast goes deeper into how this actually works when someone's asking you questions. What happens when you're pushed a bit. What you discover when you can't just give a safe answer. There's a full transcript over at the New York Review of Books if you want to sit with it.

But the real question—the one Callard's book keeps asking—is whether you're actually willing to think about your own life, or just keep moving.

Source: "She is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago." — University of Chicago Department of Philosophy