I was a little disappointed with Zvi’s review, since it was very clearly against Callard’s Socrates, which was deconstructed and reinterpreted into something (in my opinion) very different from the actual Socrates as presented by Plato and Xenophon.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that it’s almost impossible to have an understanding of something, that is good enough to respond to, from secondhand sources that aren’t explicitly trying to explain the thing. Callard isn’t trying to give the reader a good understanding of Socrates, they’re trying to make “The Case for a Philosophical Life” (the byline of the book). So any response to Callard, that talks about “Socrates” is going to annoy people who are more informed on the subject, since the Socrates being disagreed with is a controversial interpretation of Socrates that loses much of what makes him interesting in the first place.
And then real problem is that this interpretation then supplants the “real” Socrates when Callard communicates it, other people respond to it, and the memory of the discourse of the interpreted Socrates in the audience is now this deformed version that doesn’t correspond well to the original. I wonder how many other things are like that.
Excellent review.
I was a little disappointed with Zvi’s review, since it was very clearly against Callard’s Socrates, which was deconstructed and reinterpreted into something (in my opinion) very different from the actual Socrates as presented by Plato and Xenophon.
I’ve become increasingly convinced that it’s almost impossible to have an understanding of something, that is good enough to respond to, from secondhand sources that aren’t explicitly trying to explain the thing. Callard isn’t trying to give the reader a good understanding of Socrates, they’re trying to make “The Case for a Philosophical Life” (the byline of the book). So any response to Callard, that talks about “Socrates” is going to annoy people who are more informed on the subject, since the Socrates being disagreed with is a controversial interpretation of Socrates that loses much of what makes him interesting in the first place.
And then real problem is that this interpretation then supplants the “real” Socrates when Callard communicates it, other people respond to it, and the memory of the discourse of the interpreted Socrates in the audience is now this deformed version that doesn’t correspond well to the original. I wonder how many other things are like that.