
Open Socrates
The Case for a Philosophical Life
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Narrated by:
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Agnes Callard
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By:
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Agnes Callard
About this listen
An iconoclastic philosopher revives Socrates for our time, showing how we can answer—and, in the first place, ask—life’s most important questions.
Socrates 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. We know that he was tried, convicted, and executed for “corrupting the youth,” but freely assign Socratic dialogues to today’s youths, to introduce them to philosophy. We’ve lost sight of what made him so dangerous. In Open Socrates, acclaimed philosopher Agnes Callard recovers the radical move at the center of Socrates’ thought, and shows why it is still the way to a good life.
Callard draws our attention to Socrates’ 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 argues that the true ambition of the famous “Socratic method” is to reveal what one human being can be to another. You can use another person in many ways—for survival, for pleasure, for comfort—but you are engaging them to the fullest when you call on them to help answer your questions and challenge your answers.
Callard shows that Socrates’ 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.
©2025 Agnes Callard (P)2025 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Doctor Faustus
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.
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Literary self flagellation
- By Lipton101 on 02-13-25
By: Thomas Mann
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The Anatomy of Genres
- How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works
- By: John Truby
- Narrated by: Nick Mondelli
- Length: 22 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Most people think genres are simply categories on Netflix or Amazon that provide a helpful guide to making entertainment choices. Most people are wrong. Genre stories aren’t just a small subset of the films, video games, TV shows, and books that people consume. They are the all-stars of the entertainment world, comprising the vast majority of popular stories worldwide. That’s why businesses—movie studios, production companies, video game studios, and publishing houses—buy and sell them. Legendary writing teacher John Truby provides a guide to understanding the major genres of the story world.
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Audible is not the best medium for this book
- By Ken on 02-13-25
By: John Truby
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The Power of Instinct
- The New Rules of Persuasion in Business and Life
- By: Leslie Zane
- Narrated by: Kelli Tager
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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People don’t make decisions with their conscious mind, but on instinct. In The Power of Instinct, marketing consultant and behavioral science expert Leslie Zane shows that to grow a brand, business, or even a social movement, traditional persuasion tactics fall short. Instead, you must connect to the instinctive mind. And to do this, you need to understand the science of consumer choice and employ techniques that work with a person’s brain, not against it.
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Extremely insightful
- By Amazon Customer on 02-25-25
By: Leslie Zane
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Between Thought and Expression Lies a Lifetime
- Why Ideas Matter
- By: James Kelman, Noam Chomsky
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 8 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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This exhilarating collection of essays, interviews, and correspondence—spanning the years 1988 through 2018, and reaching back a decade more—is about the simple concept that ideas matter. They mutate, inform, create fuel for thought, and inspire actions. As Kelman says, the State relies on our suffocation, that we cannot hope to learn the truth. But whether we can or not is beside the point. We must grasp the nettle, we assume control and go forward.
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As expected it is smart and bold
- By Yuri on 09-21-23
By: James Kelman, and others
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Superbloom
- How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
- By: Nicholas Carr
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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From the telegraph and telephone in the 1800s to the internet and social media in our own day, the public has welcomed new communication systems. Whenever people gain more power to share information, the assumption goes, society prospers. Superbloom tells a startlingly different story. As communication becomes more mechanized and efficient, it breeds confusion more than understanding, strife more than harmony. Media technologies all too often bring out the worst in us.
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Absolutely Necessary.
- By JT on 05-18-25
By: Nicholas Carr
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The Angry Therapist
- By: John Kim
- Narrated by: John Kim
- Length: 4 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Tackling relationships, career, and family issues, John Kim, LMFT, thinks of himself as a life-style designer, not a therapist. His radical new approach, that he sometimes calls “self-help in a shot glass” is easy, real, and to the point. He helps people make changes to their lives so that personal growth happens organically, just by living.
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Great Book. a must listen audio book
- By John Butcher on 03-26-21
By: John Kim
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Hero Within (Rev. & Expanded Ed.)
- By: Carol S. Pearson
- Narrated by: Jane Oppenheimer
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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A modern classic of Jungian psychology, The Hero Within has helped hundreds of thousands of people enrich their lives by revealing how to tap the power of the archetypes that exist within. Drawing from literature, anthropology, and psychology, author Carol S. Pearson clearly defines six heroic archetypes—the Innocent, the Orphan, the Wanderer, the Warrior, the Altruist, and the Magician—and shows how we can use these powerful guides to discover our own hidden gifts, solve difficult problems, and transform our lives with rich sources of inner strength.
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Life changing journey while listening to this book.
- By SamLan on 04-07-24
By: Carol S. Pearson
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The Death of Expertise (2nd Edition)
- The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters
- By: Tom Nichols
- Narrated by: Tom Nichols
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Fully updated chapters continue to address how technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Over the past several years, the rise of populism and conspiracy theories have taken this to new levels. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.
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Tom Nichols is a partisan hack
- By Carl Almgren on 07-06-25
By: Tom Nichols
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Third Millennium Thinking
- Creating Sense in a World of Nonsense
- By: Saul Perlmutter PhD, Robert MacCoun PhD, John Campbell PhD
- Narrated by: Joe Paulino
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on a wildly popular UC Berkeley course, a primer on how to think critically, make sound decisions, and solve problems—individually and collectively—using scientists’ tricks of the trade.
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Hope
- By nnnnnnnn on 01-08-25
By: Saul Perlmutter PhD, and others
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The Story Paradox
- How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down
- By: Jonathan Gottschall
- Narrated by: Joshua Kane
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.
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A bit of a mixed bag with some amazing discussion
- By Justin on 04-27-22
Interesting and thoughtful
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The author is clearly not a narrator
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Not what you think.
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Great insights on interpersonal philosophising, and how it differs from and interacts with internal philosophising.
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ever-more annoyingly. Now I only listen for short periods of time. I’m only part way through, and I’m still interested enough not to return it, at least not yet!
Hire a good reader next time!
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The Life Socratic
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New insights on Socrates and human justification
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Timely, well read, and well thought. Well, it is written, so not quite thinking
An opposite of hell
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Fascinating Philosophy
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