Introduction: The Man Whose Name is an Example
- Why am I doing any of this?
- You make sure your thinking about how your life should go doesn't wander too far from how it is already going. You appear to be afraid of something.
- Taking life fifteen minutes at a time is a Tolstoyan strategy. The name for the opposite strategy is "Socratic".
- The Epicureans heard the voice of the body, as it screams out to us, in the language of pleasure and pain, and demands that we promote and protect and serve it. The Stoic's heard the voice of the group, when it draws each individual's attention to the fact that she is part of a larger community, and demands that she regulate her behavior accordingly.
- The action that best promotes the greatest good for the greatest number is not guaranteed to be the same, in all cases, as the action that shows respect for the dignity of another person. (This conflict is what the set of philosophical thought experiments called "trolley problems" is designed to reveal.)
- The predicament of the anti-intellectual: he is the secret slave of not one but two masters, and these masters are at way with one another. But the darkest secret of all is that these warring masters are merely feeding him back, in disguised form, the savage commands, either of his own body (Save me!) or of his own group (Cooperate with us!).
- "Being like Socrates" just means being open-minded, and willing to admit when you are wrong, and unafraid to ask challenging questions. This is not an ethical theory. It is more like a critical-thinking "sauce" that can be poured over any ethical theory, or simply over common sense. Whereas "Kantian" or "Aristotelian" refers to a set of ideas about how to live, "Socratic" refers to a style.
- The way to be good when you don't know how to be good is by learning. You should do everything in such a way as to be learning what the right thing to do it, and this means getting other people to show you when you are wrong.
- Unlike the other three traditions, Socratic ethics does not take its bearings from the savage commands of one's body, or one's group. It does not present itself as a finished system, but rather awaits its own elaboration by those who now do, and those who in the future will, understand themselves as Socratics.
- Untimely questions are marked by the fact we need answers to them before we are prepared to ask them. Our default answers - the ones available to us absent philosophizing - come from unreliable sources: our bodies, and other people. These sources issue savage commands, contradicting one another and themselves, leading us to act in confused and haphazard ways.
Part One: Untimely Questions
1. The Tolstoy Problem
2. Load-Bearing Answers
3. Savage Commands
4. Socratic Intellectualism
Part Two: The Socratic Method
5. The Gadfly-Midwife Paradox
6. Moore's Paradox of Self-Knowledge
7. Meno's Paradox
Part Three: Socratic Answers
8. Politics: Justice and Liberty
9. Politics: Equality
10. Love
11. Death
