Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life

it is not clear how someone is supposed to ask a question to which she thinks she has an answer, when she is currently using that answer to guide her life. She is not going to saw off the branch she is standing on. The question we should be asking ourselves is: How did she get on that branch in the first place?

When people converse with him, “they discover within themselves a multitude of beautiful things, which they bring forth into the light. But it is I,” he boasts, “with God’s help, who deliver them of this offspring.”

when you give someone a cognitive good, what you get, in return, is a signal of your own worth. Their willingness to receive the products of your mind is a mark or a sign of your fitness to lead. I

Among readers of Socratic dialogues, Meno’s paradox often shows up as the worry that Socrates asks leading questions.

Much of what gets called “social skill” involves inducing the feeling of equality in the face of all the facts that challenge this feeling.

Later philosophers speak of this kind of knowledge as “a priori knowledge”—a phrase denoting what we know prior to experience—or “innate ideas,” or “relations of ideas.” They want to hold on to Socrates’ notion that there is some distinct kind of knowledge at play in (for instance) geometry, access to which does not seem to depend on one’s particul

It is at this point in the discussion that people invoke the objective/subjective distinction.

we have already encountered others: there is no such thing as weakness of will, revenge (in all its guises) is incoherent, it is better to have injustice done to you than to do

politicization is the displacement of a disagreement from the context of argumentation into a zero-sum context where if one party wins, the other loses.