Steve Stanley’s Reviews > The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook > Status Update

“This book uses footnotes. . . . I prefer footnotes to endnotes because they don't require flipping to the back of the book. If you don't like footnotes, though, just ignore them here; they are never essential for understanding anything.”

Footnotes instead of endnotes? 5 stars already just with that comment alone, regardless of the rest of the book :)

Socrates, as we shall see, sometimes likes to define an elusive concept by asking for the name of its opposite. That approach can help us here, too. If I were pressed for a one-word opposite of the Socratic method, a strong candidate would be Twitter.

The Socratic method is a corrective. Before viewing it as a technique, consider it an ethic of patience, inquiry, humility, and doubt—in other words, of every good attitude discouraged by social media and disappearing from our political and cultural life. It means asking hard questions without fear and receiving them without offense; indeed, it means treating challenge and refutation as acts of friendship.

The Socratic method means, among other things, asking and receiving questions fearlessly; it means saying what you think, and not getting hot when others say what they think; it means loving the truth and staying humble about whether you know it. In other words, it's about all the good things that have been vanishing from our culture of discourse.

The teachings of Socrates can also improve conversations about all sorts of hard subjects.

This book explains what the Socratic method is and how to use it—the original method, that is, as practiced by Socrates in the dialogues of Plato. It is a book about the operation of the mind. . . . It is an approach to asking hard questions and chasing after them. . . . It is helpful for thinking about every kind of problem, large or small—how we should live and who should walk the dog.

Socrates didn't question people in order to teach us how to question people. He did it to teach us how to think. That is what makes his method a matter of general interest, not a device for specialists or special occasions. This is a practitioner's handbook, and the first lesson is that everyone is a practitioner, or can be, on any given day.