Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy

Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy is Christopher Phillips's account of an attempt to return philosophy to ordinary people, part memoir and part argument. Phillips, a former journalist, describes travelling around the United States convening open discussion groups, which he calls Socrates Cafés, in bookshops, coffee houses, schools, universities, community centres and homes for older people. Anyone may come, no training is expected, and the group chooses a question and pursues it together. The method he sets out is the Socratic one as he understands it, which is not the delivery of answers but the disciplined asking of good questions, the examination of the assumptions inside them, and the willingness to follow the argument wherever it leads. His case is that philosophy belongs to everybody rather than to the academy, that the capacity to question is already present in people who have never read a philosopher, and that the practice of asking together is of real value to those who take part. The book moves between the story of the gatherings, the questions raised in them and reflections on the philosophers behind the method.

Written from the publisher description, W. W. Norton.

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• Matthew C. Showers