Tom: Agnes, welcome to the show.

Agnes: Thank you.

Tom: I’m really excited to talk to you about your new book today, but I think before we do that, if you could first just tell me, what are some of the, the interests you had when you were young?

Agnes: I was born in Hungary, and I came to the US when I was five or six years old. I grew up in New York City. I went to college at the University of Chicago and then grad school at UC Berkeley. And then I’m still at my first job at the University of Chicago.

My earliest experiences with philosophy were when I was a high school debater, uh, I did a thing called Lincoln Douglas Debate, and I was very passionately invested in it. But I wasn’t good at it, at least not in the sense of winning my debate rounds. And I was got the impression that I would win them more if I put quotes in them from this thing called philosophy.

So, I went to a bookstore to get a bunch of books in the philosophy section so that I could take quotes from them and insert them in my speeches, which is exactly what I did. I still have some of the versions of the book where I’ve underlined the lines to put into

Tom: Oh wow.

Agnes: That was my first experience with philosophy.

Tom: Very instrumental. So, using it as a tactic to win arguments.

Agnes: Exactly. I, I failed. I did not start winning arguments. I was just as unsuccessful afterwards as before, maybe even more unsuccessful.

Tom: Did you encounter Socrates in high school with the debate preparation?

Agnes: Yes, that’s exactly how I encountered him. Uh, the Republic was one of the books I read, um, uh, and Aristotle’s politics, but I also read Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and that just blew everything else out of the water at the time. At the time, that was the book that really impressed me.

When I got to college, I told everyone I was going to be studying Kant. So yes, Socrates made the kind of initial impression, but it took a while for him to come to the fore.

Tom: How did you come back to Socrates and, really in, in some sense, fall in love with him?

Agnes: That happened in college. I took some classes that were part of the humanities core sequence here at UChicago. So, I took a class called Human Being and Citizen. But in the context of the class, I got the impression that we weren’t supposed to like Socrates too much, that he was a bit of a provocateur, a dangerous figure. Someone who could mess up your life if you get paid too much attention to him. And that made him immediately dangerous and sexy. And that was the beginning of my fascination.

Tom: Uhhuh, it’s like, do not touch this button. And so, the first thing you wanna do is touch it, right?

Agnes: Yep. Like, I got the sense that Aristotle was the person you studied if you wanted to be a respectable person. And like Socrates was like the motorcycle with the leather jacket.

Tom: I’ve never heard him described that way before. That’s great. I would like to ask you about Socrates as a historical figure first before we explore through your book together. So, what made Socrates so popular during his lifetime as a person in real flesh and blood, talking to other people?

Agnes: Um, so you know, our answer to that comes mostly from Plato and Xenophon, and Aristophanes, that is, Socrates didn’t write anything down. And so, we have our account of him from other people. And what they describe is that he, um, had just very unusual conversations with people, a kind of conversation that nobody had ever had before. And it’s not just that he sort of foisted this on people, but he somehow elicited it from them, he made them want to have this weird kind of conversation that they sort of hated, but also felt that they had to have.

Tom: He had this strong center of gravity. He, he, he pulled people to him and almost they couldn’t help but talk longer. And at the same time, he was very polarizing and. Apparently drew a lot of, of ire or resentment or jealousy or fear because what we hear in reading Plato was that he was given a, a sentence of execution and, and given poison to drink, and from accounts, he drank it and died.

I, I expect that’s not a common occurrence, even in antiquity, that someone gets that such a blunt, uh, treatment from their society. So, I kind of wonder, um, what was it about Socrates that people found so threatening?

Agnes: Yeah. So, I mean, there, there were other trials for impiety in the ancient world. So he was, he wasn’t, he wasn’t alone. but I think he was a very polarizing figure, you either loved him or you hated him, and the people who hated him felt that he was sort of destructive to the social fabric.

He was, you know, accused and charged and put on trial and found guilty and then put to death by the city of Athens. This was in 399 BC and he, uh, he was accused of corrupting the youth. And of sort of sacrilegious religious innovation, not believing the gods in the gods of the city and inventing his own gods.

As a kind of counter-cultural figure, that’s what he was seen as by some people in his society. And the way that Plato presents that critique, not just in the apology, but also, say, in the Meno when he has Socrates talk to one of his accusers, is that, for example, Socrates was the kind of guy who would, like shine a flashlight on the fact that the most aristocratic, noble, well reputed members of Athenian society, their children tended not to be as good as them.

That’s a really, threatening observation. If you think you can’t hand down your way of life to your kids, people are very upset by that observation. So, I think that, at one level, that’s what’s going on with the antipathy to Socrates; at another level, what he was doing was showing people that they didn’t know things that they thought they knew and, and that works with what the aristocrats couldn’t hand down to their kids was the knowledge they didn’t really have about how to live. They’d sort of gotten kind of lucky, and their children got less lucky.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Agnes: And you know, being shown that you don’t know what you thought you knew, um, is something that not everyone reacts well to.

Tom: Yeah. Yeah. Could you explain to me how a Socratic dialogue is different from, say, an argument or a debate, because you yourself took part in debates in high school. What is the different that’s going on with, with Socrates?

Agnes: Yeah, so they do contain arguments, but I would say really debate is a good contrast. Um, in a debate, there are always two views, right? So, there’s one person arguing for one side, and there’s another person arguing for the other side. In a Socratic dialogue, there’s only one view, the view of the interlocutor and Socrates is calling it into question.

He’s not proposing some alternative view, Socrates asks people a question, like let’s say it’s Meno, right? We mentioned Meno earlier. What is virtue? And then Mino, the first thing that Mino does is he’s like, well, that’s, that’s really easy. Socrates, do you really not know? It’s so easy. Anyone, anyone could answer that question. Um, I’m gonna be able to answer without even thinking about it. Uh, it’s like a chi a question for a child, and Socrates like, okay, so what, what’s the answer? And then Mino gives an answer, and then Socrates like, well, I see a problem with that answer.

And Meno’s like, oh, that’s fine. It’s fine. I can fix it. And then he gives another answer, and then Socrates is like, hmm, there’s still a problem. And, after Socrates kind of offers a couple of different levels of criticism of the answer, it starts to emerge to Meno that there was something that he thought he could do that, it turns out, he can’t do. So, he said, you know, I used to think I could make many fine speeches about virtue, and then I met you, Socrates, and you make my mouth go numb. And I’m not, the words don’t come out the way they’re supposed to, but there’s this experience of incompetence, but there’s also kind of, at that moment, the dialogue becomes.

An investigation to what virtue is, that is, it turns out it’s not obvious or easy to say what it is, but inquiring into it is something that we can do together, by one person putting forward a view and the other person criticizing it.

Tom: The idea at least, is that it’s more exploratory rather than a battle, perhaps.

Agnes: I think it’s an exploratory battle. In a way, the fact that there’s only one set of views on the table makes it kind of more adversarial in a certain way than a typical debate. If you and I are debating and I’m arguing for one side and you’re arguing for the other side, we can almost not talk to each other.

Tom: Right.

Agnes: We can each just try to establish our view, whereas what Socrates is doing is quite concertedly trying to show that the thing his interlocutor has just said is wrong or, usually, it’s more like this, that his interlocutor can’t claim to know it.

Tom: In your book, which I want to talk about now, entitled Open Socrates, you challenge people to be like Socrates.

So, can you tell me, what does that involve? What does that consist of? To, to be like Socrates rather than just on the sidelines, admire his dexterity and sort of creative oratorical skills.

Agnes: I’ve spent a while, a kind of experimental path to try to figure out what that means. And I tell this story in the book that when I was in college, I tried to be Socrates by going to the place in Chicago that I thought was the most similar to the Athenian Agora where Socrates had its conversations, namely the steps in front of the Art Institute in downtown Chicago, and going up to people and posing philosophical questions to them.

That was my first attempt to be Socrates. And my book isn’t telling you to do that, ’cause it doesn’t work. It was bad, it didn’t work out. People did not wanna have philosophical conversations with me. They were defensive, they were confused by what I was trying to do.

There’s a kind of flat-footed interpretation of being like Socrates. That was kind of my first one. I think the deeper one that I’m putting forward in the book is that, um, we all have different ethical outlooks, and you could think of the sort of menu of ethical outlooks that Western philosophy has offered to the world as being, um, utilitarianism is on the menu, right? Namely maximize happiness or pleasure and pain, or something like that, for everybody. Khantism which says, treat people with respect, follow the categorical imperative, and observe the moral law. Uh, Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, which says, instantiate the virtues of justice, et cetera. Okay? So, like those are three ethical theories, and you could live your life in accordance with one of them or pick a mix.

And what I think it is to be like Socrates is actually to adopt a different ethical theory that’s not on the menu, or rather I’m adding to the menu ,that that ethical theory is Socratic intellectualism, and it tells you to live your life inquisitively, which is to say, to live your life as though you were a person who didn’t already know how to live it.

In order to figure things out, you have to be talking to other people ’cause that’s how we figure things out.

Tom: Yeah. So, it sounds like with established ethical systems. One has a destination in mind. They’re trying to adhere to whether you’re following the guidance of a utilitarian system or Kian or an Aristotelian virtue, but with yours, it doesn’t sound like there’s a preset destination. It’s more of a method.

And you say you aren’t going to know where you land, but the, there’s a procedure, and then you’re gonna go on your own adventure. Does that kinda capture some of..

Agnes: I think there is a destination, it’s knowledge, but that destination has a peculiar character, a kind of open-ended character, right? So that’s the goal of the Socratic intellectuals: to have knowledge. You are not gonna have a really firm grip on the kind of content of that goal until you arrive at the knowledge.

Tom: I’m wondering to the degree to which one does discover some knowledge. One, participates uses this posture, investigates inquires, finds good conversation partners, and lo and behold, I discover some knowledge. I’m kind of wondering, is there a conflict between knowledge I discover and continuing to be open-minded? Is there some tension there with open-mindedness and, say, I have discovered something worth knowing, and here it is.

Agnes: Absolutely. There’s no reason to be open-minded once you have knowledge. Open-mindedness is a conditional virtue, which I think gets mistaken for an absolute virtue. You shouldn’t be open-minded about something you actually have knowledge about. Now, the difficulty is sometimes you think you have knowledge and you don’t.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Agnes: And then you should be open-minded. And so that’s a diff that’s precisely the condition that Socrates is interlocutors were in. And that’s why he’s in some ways very gentle and nonjudgmental about them and about seeing it as his job to make it clear to them that they don’t have the knowledge that they think they have.

Tom: Mm-hmm. Is this why it’s helpful to talk to others? Because if I’ve worked really hard to establish that I know things, how do I dismantle what I’ve been striving to do all this time? Right. Is, is that where sort of another person really helps in this condition?

Agnes: Yes, but I think even if you don’t think you have knowledge, another person could still help. Uh, and you still might need them. So, um, you know, let’s say I have some beliefs about a given area and I don’t think those beliefs for knowledge, I think there, there, there’s plenty of room for improvement and there’s probably some mistakes in there.

I don’t know which mistakes there are. I don’t know which ones are mistaken because every one of those beliefs, I think it’s true. So, the difference between knowledge and true belief is that knowledge is justified in a certain way, and so we don’t always think that. All of our beliefs constitute knowledge, but we always think all of our beliefs are true. And so the difficulty that we have in inquiring by ourselves isn’t only that we think we have knowledge when we don’t, it’s also that we have a blind spot about the falsity of our beliefs.

Tom: Yeah. And so, a degree to which we meet people who I guess either have different beliefs, different knowledge, or different blind spots, they can help kind of shine a light in some of those areas where we’re, uh, unable to see ourselves.

Agnes: Interestingly, sometimes even when they have the same blind spot, they can shine a light. There’s a really cool moment in the, in one dialogue, the Lakey, when Socrates is like, what is courage? And one of the interlocutors is like, I know what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna put forward your view. Socrates, I know you’ve said courage is knowledge, then I’ll have the right answer and you’re not gonna refute me. And Socrates just goes and refute him anyway and comes up with a really good objection to his own view. And I’ve definitely had that experience, like had someone be defending my view, and now all of a sudden I see problems with my view.

Tom: One thing I noticed in your book is that you distinguish the kind of kinds of questions people ask, and one, one thing you distinguish is between questions and problems, both of which can be formulated as an interrogative, but can you tell me a little bit about distinguishing between those terms and, and, and making them, each play a, different role in the conversation?

Agnes: So I think those are very different inquisitive structures. Are you trying to get rid of a problem that was standing in the way of you doing some other thing? Or is there something you really wanna know where you’ll be happy when you know it?

Tom: Yeah. I wonder if you could give me an example of one thing where you could formulate it like a question or formulate it like a problem to be solved. Is there something that could kind of play one way or the other depending on how you handle it? I.

Agnes: Yeah, I’ll give you the example that I happen to be working on right now, ’cause I’m about to go to a conference on AI. You could ask, what is it for machines to be conscious? Like what would it mean for a machine to think, that’s a question. I would love to know the answer to that question. What would it mean for an artificial intelligence to be a thinker?

Turing took a look at that question, and he’s like, that’s impossible. How about we ask a different question? Or rather, how about we pose a problem? The problem is to design a machine that can pass the following test, and the test is that, you know, you take the machine and you take a human and they’re both competing against each other to seem human, to a human interrogator who’s in a different room and they’re communicating by text. When the computer is better than the human at coming across as a human, it’s past the test, and it counts as thinking. So, the Turing test takes the question, what is consciousness or what is machine consciousness, and turns it into a problem you could solve by designing that machine.

Tom: Interesting. You can take a question, turn it into a problem, solve the problem while still not answering the question.

Agnes: Right. So here’s interesting, uh, people did this recently with, uh, chat GPT 4.5 and Llama that is, they set up the Turing test. They did an actual experiment, and Lama was able to come across as a human about 56% of the time. Which is roughly the rate a human would have, right? That’s pretty good. That is, if you had two humans, they would each get 50%, right?

So it’s not bad, 56% .Chat GBT got a score of 73%. So, it is substantially better at coming across as a human than humans are.

Tom: The idea occurs to me, why don’t we assign some of these really tough philosophical questions to people who are best equipped to think, and then the rest of society can sort of benefit and deploy the answers would that not be a better path forward than people who are just average at thinking philosophically and, and trying to do it.

Agnes: I feel torn about this question. I mean, one thing to first just note about the Socratic method is that it entails a certain kind of division of labor, right? So, you know, I argue in my book that there’s a real problem with thinking, namely, it’s really a job for more than one person, because you both need to have a truth and you need to avoid falsehood in order to think. And those two goals pull against each other.

And so what the Socratic inquiry does is it has one person adopt the have truth role and the other person adopt the avoid falsehood role. And by way of that division of labor, you can make inquisitive progress, but it’s a peculiar kind of division of labor.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Agnes: It’s maybe more like two people on a boat and they each take one ore, or something, where it’s pretty important to you doing your part that the other person do their part. And in at some level you’re doing it together.

It’s not like, well, go off and do your thing, and I can ignore you. So, I think, you know, one way to think about that might be that philosophical knowledge, the kind of knowledge that we pursue by means of these inquiries, is knowledge of the meaning of your own life would just be something you can’t farm out to other people. Of all the things that other people can do for you, there are limits to that, right? Like do you want other people to choose your spouse? Maybe. Do you want other people to love your spouse for you? There’s a certain point where it’s like, well, there’d be nothing left of me if I had other people do those things for me, and I think Socrates thinks this is the most fundamental thing that you have to do for yourself.

The little wrinkle there is, I think he would think, look, if some people had knowledge about this, they would teach it to the rest of us. It’s not that we don’t need to have the knowledge ourselves, but it’s that it would go a lot faster.

You know, in the way that you learn a math proof, somebody explains it to you first, as opposed to you have to figure it out yourself.

Tom: I wanna talk about a topic that maybe is of that sort that we don’t wanna offload to others, and that’s the question of our own mortality and death.

You, uh, give it great attention in your last chapter in the book, Socrates gives it great attention in, in Plato’s dialogue where he is facing death. And here he is philosophizing about death. And if I remember correctly, he makes the claim that philosophy itself can help you prepare for death. Can you remind me and our listeners what’s the substance of, of Socrates’s argument that philosophy can prepare us for death.

Agnes: Yeah. Um, so I, he wants to make an even stronger claim. He wants to say that philosophy is a preparation for death and even a stronger one. Philosophers are people who are practicing dying. I sort of agonize over this a bit in the chapter and I give a couple of different readings, but let me give you the final one that I land on. One reason to fear death is that you’re afraid of missing out on the kinds of goods that you’ve enjoyed throughout your life. You like hanging out with your family and going to movies, and hosting this podcast, et cetera. And after you’re dead, you can’t do any of those things. I call that FOMO. Okay. And that’s not, I think, the fear that philosophy is primarily oriented towards, what I say is that there’s another reason we have a fear of death and it’s that sometimes we take on big projects, projects that might be too big for a lifetime or they might be too big for the amount of time we have left in our lives.

Someone who wants to cure cancer or something like that, they might know that it’s not gonna be finished in the course of their life, and they might say, well, what’s the point of you doing anything if I can’t achieve it by the end of my life?

We’ve sort of relied on the work of people who were willing to keep on working even though they wouldn’t see the fruits of their labors. And it’s easy to become despondent and to think, well, if I’m not gonna achieve this, you know, in my life, what’s even the point? And Socrates thinks that philosophy is like training in battling that fear, because every single day as a philosopher, you get into conversations where, you kind of know that in this conversation you’re not gonna get to the bottom of the question.

So, you start the conversation knowing it’s going to be interrupted. You’re gonna have a class to teach or you’re gonna have to go to bed or whatever, and why even start if you’re not gonna get to the end, right? And, but you do. I think Socrates thinks that’s the battle against FONA. Well, I call it FONA fear of never arriving. That’s the way in which philosophers are practicing every day for death.

That is, we are engaged in a project that’s too big for a day and too big for a lifetime, but we keep at it anyway because we think that humanity is going to make progress on these questions in virtue of us. Individually doing our best to work towards a progress that we’ll never see.

Tom: One more question about death, and I think one of the most striking things to me when I read Plato and this account of Socrates death is Socrates is very serene when he has this cup of poison in front of him. He’s gonna be the one that’s gonna die, and yet it’s his friends that are freaking out and he has a certain poise about him that he doesn’t panic. I’m not sure if it’s a, if it’s a cool exterior and if he’s tormented inside, but he is serene, and his interlocutors are not. What does Socrates at least tell his friends that gives him that serenity that they’re lacking?

Agnes: So, there’s a detail about the feto that I fasten onto that suggests that Socrates isn’t totally serene. He is when he’s dying, but he wasn’t like the night before. So, we find out at the beginning of the Feto that Socrates is in jail. He’s in his jail cell, right, waiting to die, but he’s been there for like two weeks. And, we find out that, when he’s been there by himself, he has been composing poetry, he’s been setting esop, like ESOP’s, fables to verse.

Tom: Mm-hmm.

Agnes: And you can, you know, you could just say, aha. Yeah, sure. But this is shocking. Okay. To anyone who knows Socrates, this is like, there’s nothing really nothing more shocking that Socrates could say he was spending his time doing than that. And that’s because, first of all, Socrates is against writing. So, he’s quite explicit in the ris, he doesn’t, uh, see much value in written texts because, um, when you read them and then you have some questions for them and you ask those questions, they just say the same thing again.

They always repeat themselves. Unlike a person who will say something different, he is against poetry because poets dunno what they’re talking about and they’re just pretending to know what they’re talking about. And also he is against, sort of, arranged words. That is, he will often pride himself on the fact that he just says the words that come out of his mouth in the order that come out of his mouth. He’s not like trying to arrange them carefully. Right. But, of course, if he’s diversifying, he is, he’s trying to make the words fit a meter. Okay. So, this is really shocking that he’s doing this.

And when asked why he’s doing it, He says, his whole lifelong, he’s had this dream, one of the muses is coming to him and saying, practice the arts. And he always thought that it was just encouraging him in his pursuit of philosophy. But when he’s sitting there in his jail cell in the dark by himself at night, he starts to think, wait, maybe I had it all wrong. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be doing philosophy. Maybe I was supposed to become a poet, right? Maybe everything I think is completely wrong. Writing is actually good. Poets are actually knowledgeable to arrange your words.

So that’s like a kind of crisis that Socrates seems to be experiencing alone by himself in his jail cell that I think, it’s a form of panicking. It’s a pretty profound form of panicking. The difference between Socrates and his friends is that the presence of Socrates’ friends makes a huge difference to him.

So, when Socrates’ friends are there, and in particular because his friends are philosophizing with him, then Socrates gets steered right back onto the philosophy course. He’s like, of course this is what I’m supposed to be doing. But, like anyone else, he is prone to that kind of lonely, late-night terror that we all have, in the face of death. And I think Socrates’ thought is that’s not the real test. The real test is like what happens when your friends are there to help you? Are you able to steer both yourself and them onto a philosophical course? And that is just what Socrates does. He won’t let them cry. He won’t let them spend time mourning him and lamenting. He’s like, no, we’re gonna do philosophy.

And they do it right up until the end.

Tom: With the short time we have remaining, I wanna ask a few questions about us and imitating Socrates. So, I’m wondering are some good indicators to suggest that I might be doing it well.

Agnes: Yeah, let me switch the question.

Tom: Please.

Agnes: What would be some indicators that you were doing it more than before?

Tom: Yes. Yes.

Agnes: There’s something that this book is designed to help you notice, which is inquisitive opportunities. That is, you’ll be talking to someone and there’s an opportunity that you might’ve passed by on another occasion, an opportunity to ask a question, an opportunity to challenge them about something, or it can go the other way. They can say something to you where people, we do this a lot, where you could sort of choose to hear it as a challenge, and they’re testing you.

Is he okay with being challenged on this? And you can decide to hear it that way and sort of welcome it and invite it. That’s why people felt compelled to continue talking to Socrates because he was pulling at a thread that’s woven into human interaction quite generally. He wasn’t just playing some weird game that people could opt out of. He was noticing a key element of the game we’re already playing. And so what I’m trying to do is, is, is draw your attention to it and at the simplest level, it’s like there’s something you could ask a question about. Or there’s something someone says to you that you could choose to hear as them calling it into question. and you do those things more.

Tom: I’m gonna turn back to your own life. You gave the anecdote of really trying to like, play the role of Socrates in a public space, talking to strangers, and didn’t quite go as smoothly as, as Plato’s dialogues. But I’m wondering, as, as you’ve grown and experimented and, and met more people, what are some of the things that you’ve, you’ve learned and some of the insights you’ve gained in maybe on a deeper level trying to live according to the principles of Socrates.

Agnes: Maybe the most important one is that people who are trying to show you that you’re wrong are trying to help you,

Tom: Hmm.

Agnes: Socrates has a stronger version of that claim. He says “The greatest favor that one human being can do another is to refute them.”

Tom: Hmm.

Agnes: And I think when you approach life with that, kind of as your motto,

 I think you become. Much more attuned to the dangers of flattery and much more receptive to what might otherwise seem like hostile behavior on the part of. You know, in Socratic philosophy, there’s this funny rule, which is that if two people are having an argument, the one that’s refuted is the one who benefits from the argumentative exchange, right?

So, it’s like the loser is the winner in a Socratic exchange. And I think I learned a ton by doing debate in particular. I learned about philosophy, right? So, I kept on doing this, losing, sort of winning. That was maybe my first taste of the losing kind of winning. And I guess I’m still doing it.

Tom: Well, Agnes, this has been a great conversation today. Um, there’s a lot I wanna reflect on, and I’m gonna try imitating socrates.