It cannot have been easy to produce
an adequate follow-up to Socrates’ Café,
but Christopher Phillips seems to have pulled it off with great success. Echoing
themes in Holderlin and Heidegger (The Ister) concerning the illuminated
encounter of home as jarred by confrontation with the foreign, Six Questions
of Socrates opens from the premise that philosophical meditation arises in
response to human differences. Phillips takes up a philosophical journey through
Socrates’ six questions with those various peoples he meets along the path of
his travels about the globe.

Phillips describes a Socratic journey
of philosophical inquiry on matters utterly pertinent to Socrates’ "most
important matter"–the "right conduct of life" (Republic
1.352d). His  confrontations with the human world, stretching through Greece,
Spain, Japan, Korea, Mexico, and across the United States from New York City to
the Navajo Nation, extend the Socratic quest for the "right conduct of
life" beyond the ethnocentric cultural space of ancient Athens and into
the human world at large–those the Greeks would prejudicially name the "barbaroi."
Phillips’ dialogues with a broad range of human subjects, from citizens of the
West, to immigrants from Islamic lands, and to university students from
Palestinian territories, Israel and other Central Asian nations, gives the
reader an appreciation of the vast wealth of wisdom beyond the narrow domain of
white Western modernist philosophy, undermining the still prominent
ethnocentric bias that favors the latter.

The little book, Six Questions
of Socrates, takes the perennial questions of philosophy–what is justice; what
is piety; what is good; what is virtue; what is moderation; what is courage–and
extends the scope of their response-ability to a global philosophical engagement.
By recreating Socratic-style investigations into the meanings and accepted "truths"
of these crucial ethical questions, by taking these questions to people in all
walks of life, from all sorts of backgrounds, into all manners of venue, and
across the vast stretches of the globe, Phillips accomplishes an ethical task
of which Socrates would surely be most proud. Phillips gives voice to
wisdom-seekers in the café, in the community center, in public housing projects,
in the homeless shelter, in the maximum-security prison, and in mental health
institutions. Along the way of this elaborate journey into vastly divergent
lifeworlds, Phillips exposes his readership to the vast breadth of meaning
embedded in ethical notions and their crucial role in human experience across
philosophical, religious, and cultural divides. Ironically, in discovering the
differences, what is brought into stark view for the reader is the plethora of
kindred spirits bound across time and space by the philosophical and ethical
quest. Thus does the possibility arise that the otherwise menacing world of
human differences may be drawn into closer, more consonant, more benevolent
community.

Six Questions of Socrates would
make a fine opening text for any introductory philosophy class. It also provides
a fascinating and seductive opening to the world of philosophical thought
easily accessible to the budding lay-philosopher. However, even the
professional philosopher, tired of dragging the exhausted mind through long
arid meditations of the Phenomenology of Spirit, will appreciate the
fresh, grounded, engaged approach of this little book, and feel inspired to put
down the painful classic tome and join in the chorus of global voices actively
engaged in human affairs and calling for human rights beyond the ivory tower.

© 2005 Wendy Hamblet

Wendy C. Hamblet,
Ph.D., Philosophy Department, Adelphi
University, New
York, author of The Sacred Monstrous: A
Reflection on Violence in Human Communities (Lexington Books, 2003).

Categories: Philosophical