The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

The Socratic Method: A Practitioner's Handbook

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Overview

A thinking person’s guide to a better life. Ward Farnsworth explains what the Socratic method is, how it works, and why it matters more than ever in our time. Easy to grasp yet challenging to master, the method will change the way you think about life’s big questions.

About 2,500 years ago, Plato wrote a set of dialogues that depict Socrates in conversation. The way Socrates asks questions, and the reasons why, amount to a whole way of thinking. This is the Socratic method—one of humanity’s great achievements. More than a technique, the method is an ethic of patience, inquiry, humility, and doubt. It is an aid to better thinking, and a remedy for bad habits of mind, whether in law, politics, the classroom, or tackling life’s big questions at the kitchen table.

Drawing on hundreds of quotations, this book explains what the Socratic method is and how to use it. Chapters include “Question and Answer,” “Ignorance,” and “Socrates and the Stoics.” Socratic philosophy is still startling after all these years because it is an approach to asking hard questions and chasing after them. It is a route to wisdom and a way of thinking about wisdom. With Farnsworth as your guide, the ideas of Socrates are easier to understand than ever and accessible to anyone.

As Farnsworth achieved with The Practicing Stoic and the Farnsworth’s Classical English series, ideas of old are made new and vital again. This book is for those coming to philosophy the way Socrates did—as the everyday activity of making sense out of life and how to live it—and for anyone who wants to know what he said about doing that better.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9798200697052
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Publication date: 01/04/2022
Product dimensions: 5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ward Farnsworth is dean and John Jeffers Research Chair at the University of Texas School of Law. He received his JD with high honors from the University of Chicago Law School, and his BA from Wesleyan University. He is the author of books on law, philosophy, rhetoric, and chess and has published scholarly articles on the economic analysis of law, constitutional law, statutory interpretation, jurisprudence, and cognitive psychology.


Patrick Cullen (a.k.a. John Lescault), a native of Massachusetts, is a graduate of the Catholic University of America. He lives in Washington, DC, where he works in theater.

Table of Contents

Preface vii

1 The Socratic Problem 3

2 Method vs. Doctrine 16

3 Elements of the Method 22

4 The Socratic Function 35

5 Question and Answer 43

6 The Elenchus 54

7 Consistency 66

8 Systole and Diastole 76

9 Analogies 87

10 Socratic Rules for Dialogue 98

11 Ignorance 116

12 Aporia 128

13 Socratic Goods 138

14 Socratic Ethics 151

15 Socrates and the Stoics 165

16 Socrates and the Skeptics 183

17 Finding Principles 196

18 Testing Principles 206

Epilogue : Socratic Rules of Engagement 221

Translations 231

Bibliography 233

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