Matthew LaGrone, Awarded Tenure
Department of Health and Human Services, Faculty of Health and Community Studies
Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard
The book is great, but I've selected because it stands as an introduction to a remarkable mind. Her prose is analytic, spare, angular, and moves easily between the personal and abstract.
She argues for the value of the philosophical life and Socrates’ place as a guide in that life, but I never get the sense that the focus of the book is about raising/lowering the status of other philosophical approaches, or retrofitting Socrates to contemporary social and political positions.
Instead, her aim is to model a way of thinking. The goal is not to win an argument, but to learn together by provoking questions and clarifying our intentions, intuitions, and assumptions. Inquiry is social; to argue about what is true--truth, of course, remaining rare, elusive--is not combative or competitive but caring: it is an act of attention to another mind.
Year of Recognition: 2025