February 2025

My reflections on the books I read this month

Open Socrates: The case for a philosophical life

by Agnes Callard

This book is an extended discussion and defense of what Callard calls Socratic inquiry. She thinks that Socrates’ extensive questioning of his many interlocutors was a manifestation both of his role as gadfly (exposing that people really couldn’t offer solid definitions of values crucial to their living) and midwife (exposing fundamental beliefs about these values that the interlocutors did not know they had).

Callard begins her discussion with an account of Tolstoy’s life and writings. She finds that in several of his novels, and also in his personal life, Tolstoy confronted questions about the meaning of life head-on. But, she says, neither he nor the characters in his novels were able to answer them satisfactorily. In contrast, Socrates lived his life confronting these questions, both in his own reflections and in his sometimes tense conversations with his fellow Athenians.

At the base of all these questions is the question “Why?” Tolstoy: “Before occupying myself with the Samsara estate, the education of my son, the writing of a book, I had to know why I would be doing that. As long as I didn’t know why, I couldn’t do anything. … And I couldn’t answer anything, anything at all” (pp. 3f).

Callard calls these questions “untimely questions” — questions that press on the beliefs so crucial to our existence and self-knowledge – indeed, to our identity — that we simply can’t question them. We find it difficult if not impossible to set these beliefs aside. They are central to who we are. Socrates, she says, pushed his interlocutors to engage these questions directly. To follow his lead today is to draw “attention to the importance of evaluating that part of you that is doing the thinking. Those thoughts that are undetachable from the project of thinking — thoughts you are always ‘using’ in order to think anything at all — are what you really need to know if you want to cultivate yourself” (p. 199).

Crucial to her argument is the insistence that we cannot do this sort of thinking on our own. We need help. That help comes in the form of Socratic inquiry – social inquiry in which we engage with others in the same sort of conversations that Plato’s Socratic dialogues describe Socrates having with others.

Callard says that there are three paradoxes that complicate understanding just how this process of self-discovery can work:

How can we both affirm truth and avoid falsity? – the Gadfly-Midwife paradox. Is Socrates a gadfly, dedicated to showing that we don’t know what we think we know, or a midwife, bringing out the knowledge that we have but don’t know that we have?

Callard says that Socrates is in fact both – “Socrates equates the negative process of refutation and the positive process of discovery. Socrates the gadfly is Socrates the midwife. Socrates engages in productive inquiry by doing nothing other than refuting people” (p. 159).

How can one be open-minded about these question? – the Moore paradox. In living my life, I assume answers to these untimely questions; since I cannot avoid assuming these answers, I can’t challenge those answers. “Either we cannot be open-minded about untimely questions, or we must somehow be able to think, ‘p is wrong, even though I believe p’” (p. 144).

Socratic dialogue is crucial here: “Thinking is, paradigmatically, a social quest for better answers to the sorts of questions [i.e., untimely questions] that show up for us already answered. It is a quest because it has a built-in endpoint: knowledge. It is social because it operates by resolving disagreements between poeple. Thinking begins when Socrates, or someone like him, recognizes that his account of justice, or piety, or love is not as good as it could be — which is to say, that it does not qualify as knowledge” (p. 237).

How is this inquiry possible? – the Meno paradox. How can I seek to learn something that I don’t know? If I don’t know it, then how do I know what to look for? And how do I recognize it?

Again, Socratic inquiry to the rescue: “Alone, we do fall prey to Meno’s paradox: our answer either satisfies us or we lose hold of the question. But if you and I both have the same question yet different answers, a path opens up: we can test our answers against each other. This process is Socratic inquiry. The Socratic method is a way you can make progress without knowing in advance how you are going to do so” (p. 224).

Callard closes the book by discussing how Socratic inquiry plays out in three crucial areas of human life: politics, love, and death.

In politics, humans decide how they are to live together. “To say that human beings are social picks out the fact that a normal human life is a life spent with other humans; to say that we are political means something more specific, which is that we live together under a shared idea of how to do so. … the fundamental problem of politics … is that we sometimes have trouble living together” (p. 250). And we resolve this problem through social inquiry, which, she says, is our only hope of arriving at a common understanding of ideals such as justice, freedom, and equality. It’s only when we engage in such dialogue that we are truly free. “It is when the topics, values, and commitments that are central to a person’s life become open for discussion and adjudication with others that she can be said to ‘live together’ with those others in a substantive sense. I call that way of living together with other people ‘free’” (p. 267).

Similarly, she says, a person who truly loves another person isn’t loving that person’s qualities – those qualities can change, and the love for one person might die when the lover meets another person who embodies those qualities more deeply. This is not true love. Socrates insists that the proper target of love is not the person, and not the qualities of the person, but something “divine and perfect and unimprovable” (p. 309). This is sought in Socratic inquiry, which “is truly dangerous, transgressive, and exciting” (p. 310).

Finally, the fear and expectation of death make it difficult if not impossible to avoid confronting those untimely questions. To anticipate death is to think “about the time when there is nothing left that stands between you and untimely questions, when they can be delayed no longer. Preparation for death is preparation for that time, and to do philosophy is to see that time as now” (p. 368). And here Callard comes full circle, contrasting Socrates’ encounter with death, as described in the Phaedo, with that of Tolstoy, this time expressed in his character Ivan Ilyich: “Ivan [Ilyich] is torn between staring death in the face and suffering, alone, inexpressibly, on the one hand, and looking away from death, alongside his family and friends, on the other. Socrates, by contrast looks death straight in the eye, and has a conversation with his friends about it” (p. 344).

It’s been years since I’ve read the bulk of Plato’s Socratic dialogues; I’m not going to attempt the important inquiry whether Callard’s Socrates is in fact the same person as Plato’s. But I will say that Callard has me thinking more than I was about the relationship between intellectual inquiry and dialogue, on the one hand, and living in the world, on the other. This, I think, is especially valuable in the tangled and troubled world in which we’re living now.

Small Things Like These

by Claire Keegan

I’m not sure just what I can say about this short but powerful novel without including any spoilers. I think I’ll just say that there’s a protagonist who finds himself wondering first just how he came to be the person that he is and then, more deeply, pondering the meaning of his life. Ultimately, he decides, his life’s meaning is grounded in decisions that he makes, regardless of the pressures of those around him.

I think I’m dangerously close to the line between spoiling and not spoiling; I hope that I’ve not crossed it.

Meditations for Mortals

by Oliver Burkeman

Burkeman begins with the admonition that you’re a finite person facing an infinite number of things that you might do, choices that you might make, so you might as well give up the thought that you will ever get to go to bed having accomplished everything that you “should” have done that day. Or, as he titles the first meditation, “It’s worse than you think.”

Thus begin these “meditations.” Each of the four weeks has its heading, moving from “Being finite” to “Taking action” to “Letting Go” to “Showing up.”

Some might see this as yet another self-help book, which I think is selling it short. I see it more as what’s implied in the title and subtitle: a set of 48 reflections, ideally to be read and considered a day at a time, allowing the reflections to shape how one lives a life. I read it as recommended, taking four weeks to work my way through the book, beginning each day living with the day’s meditation. I won’t attempt here to summarize the whole of the book, but I will note the admonition that quite literally changed my life:

“… treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up [and even overflows], and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others flow by.”

Indeed.

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

by Jenny Odell

I read this book the first time shortly after it was published in 2019. I found it a powerful book then, and I find it even more powerful now as I re-read it in our current political and cultural havoc.

Odell does a good job of placing the challenges of the attention economy in the broader context of environmental damage and economic/social inequality. She insists that the current version of commercial online forums makes it difficult to engage meaningfully. She builds on research by Veronica Barissi indicating that activists seeking to engage online face three challenges:

the pace of online exchanges is such that it’s impossible to stay up

the immediacy of the exchanges makes it difficult to find the space and time for “political elaboration” (“Because the content that activists share online has to be ‘catchy,’ ‘activists do not have the space and time to articulate their political reflections.’”)

Ties established online are “weak ties”: “Stong ties and well-defined projects … still come from ‘action on the ground … face-to-face interaction, discussion, deliberation, and confrontation.’”

Odell states, and I agree, that these challenges face anyone who attempts to engage online, both activists and others. Perhaps our practice has evolved since 2019 so that we’re now able to have more meaningful engagement in some online forums, but I think such engagement is virtually impossible in such forums as Facebook and Twitter, in which the algorithms push an altogether different sort of engagement. (As an aside, I find it interesting that Odell, writing in 2019, includes a brief and positive mention of Mastodon, while Chris Hayes’s very good book, published in 2025 (and described below) has no mention of it at all.)

The challenges we face in the United States and the world more generally are enormous – so enormous that I find it difficult to sort out just how to respond. (And, I admit, I’m feeling more and more uneasy about my commitment to continue reading and thinking about anything at all that doesn’t contribute directly to fighting against the current efforts to destroy our democracy.) But consider this from Odell:

“If it’s attention (deciding what to pay attention to) that makes our reality, regaining control of it can also mean the discovery of new worlds and new ways of moving through them. … this process enriches not only our ability to resist, but even more simply, our access to the one life we are given. It can open doors where we didn’t see any, creating landscapes in new dimensions that we can eventually inhabit with others. In so doing, we not only remake the world but are ourselves remade” (p. 94).

And, she says, we need to realize that we are remaking the world and ourselves rather than simply making them. We start from where we are, and with who we are. Odell faults the understanding of the so-called progressive movements in the nineteenth century as being purely constructive — “Nineteenth-century views of progress, production, and innovation relied on an image of the land as a blank slate where its current inhabitants and systems were like so many weeds in what was destined to become an American lawn. But if we sincerely recognize all that was already here, both culturally and ecologically, we start to understand that anything framed as construction was actually also destruction” (p. 192). Turning this on its head, she pushes us to attend to and engage with the world in which we are living today, with all of its suffering and inequities.

I find myself encouraged by the program she suggests, even as I believe that the challenges we face today are radically more dangerous than those she considered in 2019.

The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource

By Chris Hayes

The fundamental points of this book are reflected in its title and subtitle; Hayes also offers a succinct statement of his argument: “… we should think of attention as a resource, a substance extracted for its market value, and … this resource has been growing in value and is now the most important resource” (p. 189f). What’s more, those who would like to monetize that resource for themselves have developed and employed a wide range of technologies and strategies to do just that.

This, in itself, is not a new argument, and I admit that I was already sympathetic to it before beginning to read this book. But what I find especially insightful is an analogy Hayes develops between commoditized labor and commoditized attention. Just as labor was made a commodity in the industrial revolution, he argues, attention has been made a commodity in the current attention economy. Drawing on the work of Michael Polanyi, he suggests that both labor and attention are fictitious commodities. Unlike other commodities, which have been produced for the market, attention and labor have their own standing in human life and have been co-opted by the market.

“…Polanyi argues that the process for fictitious commodities necessarily involves a kind of transformation of society as a whole. To turn labor into a commodity you must reorder society, create new legal, technological, and institutional regimes that can take the essential work of human effort and turn into a measurable unit with a price. … Clearly, our attention does have a price, set within a developed, sophisticated market between buyers of attention and sellers of it. But that economic fact can’t ever be detached from a deeper truth about the meaning of what this fictitious commodity is outside of its economic function. It will, like our labor, forever remain something irreducibly different to us than what it means to a market participant that’s purchasing it at a given price. … The alienation we feel is born of the tension between attention as a market commodity and attention as the substance of our lives” (p. 130ff).

I also appreciate Hayes’s discussion of the three facets of attention: voluntary attention, involuntary attention (e.g., when a loud noise or sudden interruption forces us to attend to the cause), and social attention. I found his discussion of social attention particularly helpful. He devotes considerable attention (see what I did there?) to that facet, suggesting that our need for real connections with other human beings – our desire both to be attended to by others and to attend to others — is largely rooted to our experience as infants when we were so reliant on others’ care that we demanded their attention. “As part of that inescapable inheritance, we will forever be invested in other people paying attention to us. … And this social need will always be a central aspect of the complex frictions at work in how our own attention is focused. In fact, it is this facet of attention that the attention merchants of the age have most effectively exploited” (p. 38). In this context, he mentions an important point from Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child on neglect: “Chronic neglect is associated with a wider range of damage than active abuse, but it receives less attention in policy and practice” (pp. 82f).

I found many other gems along the way, including the reference to important insights from people as diverse as John Maynard Keynes, Herbert Simon, and Michael Goldhaber.

Of course, all of this presents a seemingly intractable problem: How do we respond? Here I find his argument a little thin. He suggests some possibilities reflected in the recent resurgence of vinyl records and the insistence of some people to read physical media (books and newspapers) instead of digital forms. (And, I admit, if he’s writing for me and people like me, he’s preaching to the choir here.) More controversially, and building on his analogy between labor and attention, he suggests that we might eventually push for some regulation of the co-opting of our attention much as earlier organizers pushed for regulations of the co-opting of labor. Some might find this unlikely – and he admits that the U.S.’s first amendment makes this a difficult enterprise – but he points out that neither the ban on child labor nor the limitations on total hours worked came easily or “seemed obvious and commonsense at the time, at least to the titans of industry and politicians who fought themm. It took a tremendous amount of political mobilization, agitation, and persuasion to move governments toward banning child labor and capping the number of hours workers could work” (p. 265). So perhaps we’ll eventually come to that.

In short, I found this to be a very helpful and important book, not only for helping me to understand and navigate the attention economy, but also providing still more insight into the challenges that economy presents both to our attempts to carry on quotidian tasks and to maintain anything like a reasonable democracy.

If he were more cheesy, he might have closed the book with something like “Attenders of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but that inescapable urge to pull your phone out of your pocket (and the democracy you say you cherish)!” But he’s a better writer than that.

The Notebook: A history of thinking on paper

by Roland Allen

This is an ambitious and readable investigation of the development of the notebook in its many forms, together with an account of how different uses of notebooks emerged to satisfy different needs at different times. (Yes, I know – there’s a lot of difference there!) Allen begins, appropriately enough, with how the Moleskin notebooks emerged in late 20th century and quickly became the rage. He then moves back in history to the Mediterranean area of 1000 BCE, describing what we know about some of the precursors to paper notebooks before coming to the development first of papyrus and then of paper, and the binding of these materials into something resembling what we think of today as a notebook.

He discusses the technology and the material characteristics, but he also, and more importantly, discusses how notebooks became essential tools of practice in completing tasks and then how the notebooks themselves reshaped the nature of those tasks and human practices. There were crucial developments in accounting – including the invention of double-entry accounting — in which business people made extensive use of ledgers that allowed the track profits and expenses of producing different products. Sailors began to keep logbooks of their journeys, eventually recording weather data – and, crucially for today’s studies of the rate of climate change — the presence of ice flows in different locations at different times of the year.

He discusses the note-taking practices of significant figures like Leonardo and Charles Darwin – Darwin: “Let the collector’s motto be ‘Trust nothing to the memory, for the memory becomes a fickle guardian when one interesting object is succeeded by another still more interesting’” (p. 250), showing how the availability of such notes helps us to understand how prominent thinker came to hold the views that they held. He also discusses artists’ use of sketchbooks, showing how they help us to understand developmental stages of an artist like Picasso as he moved farther and farther into abstractions. And there are case studies of Ryder Carroll, the inventor of the Bullet Journal, and Florida governor and U.S. senator Bob Graham, whose extensive use of notebooks were both an effective tool and an object of ridicule. (See a brief account of Graham’s revenge for this ridicule in this blog post.)

Near the end of the book, he points to the work of philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers who developed the notion of the extended mind, suggesting that the use of tools like notebooks should be considered part of the cognitive process – even, as the title of their paper suggests, part of the mind — rather than external tools that assist in cognition.

In short, he discusses notebook use both past and present, several of which I plan to incorporate into my own note-taking practice.

The Best of All Possible Worlds: A life of Leibniz in seven pivotal days

by Michael Kempe.

I’ve read very little of Leibniz, and I really don’t understand what little I’ve read. Leibniz was perhaps the last person who could reasonably claim to comprehend the whole of human knowledge (of the western world, but also some of the east) at the time when he was living. I can’t say that I would have picked up what might be called a standard biography of Leibniz, but I was intrigued by the notion that Kempe might offer a solid account of such a complicated man by describing seven pivotal days of his life. “Well,” I thought, “I might read about seven days if it would offer me a glimpse of the full 70 years of his life.”

Of course, Kempe doesn’t restrict his discussion to what happened only on those seven days. In each case, he focuses on the day as a significant turning point in Leibniz’s intellectual development, and doing this well requires some attention to things that came before and also to things that came after.

As one would expect, Leibniz’s quarrel with Newton and Clarke regarding who invented calculus and also the nature of time and space comes into the discussion. Kempe describes a particular day when Leibniz first developed a notational system, or symbolic language, in which one could express the mathematical concepts much more economically than Newton’s system allowed. “How to describe … the successful creativity that is on display this Tuesday [29 October 1675]? Leibniz proceeds in accordance with a distinct methodical pattern: a complex concept consisting of the sum of infinitesimal values (captured by the term omnes or summa) gets expressed in condensed form by means of a simple symbol (ſ). The symbol simplifies the concept and elevates it to a higher plane, where, in abstracted form and in accordance with certain rules, one can easily input it into further calculations. It doesn’t matter which particular sum the long s is supposed to stand for here. The most difficult operations featuring the use of the infinite as a mathematical limit can now be solved in a trice — as if they were being solved automatically by human reason” (p. 27). (For the record, Kempe doesn’t come down on either side of the larger debate between Newton and Leibniz.)

In another chapter (covering another day), Kempe discusses Leibniz’s endeavor to design and build hydraulic systems that would move water through the fountains and ponds of a sovereign’s garden. On another, Leibniz develops one of the earliest expressions of the binary system now central to computer technology. On yet another, Leibniz investigates a rumor that there was a time when a woman – a pregnant woman – served as pope, and was discovered only when she delivered a child at an inopportune moment. Leibniz did a detailed historical analysis of the succession of the popes, and claimed to show that the time period in question was already accounted for by the (male) popes whose tenure we know. (Not incidentally, Leibniz was also interested in countering the claims of Protestants that this episode demonstrated the corruption of the Catholic Church; this was not the only time that Leibniz worked to ease the divisions between religious communities. On another day, in another letter, he hinted at an understanding of how species might change (and new species might emerge) that foreshadowed the work of Darwin a century and a half later.

So, while I still can’t claim to understand all of the ins and outs of Leibniz’s philosophy, I do have a glimpse of the complexities of his thought and also of how his work in the many fields in which he worked come together. I’m not convinced I live in the best of all possible worlds, but I do have a better understanding of what that might mean than I had before.

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