Philosophy 101 by Socrates

by Peter Kreeft

Ignatius Press, 2002

149 pages, $10.95

To order: (800) 651-1531

or www.ignatius.com

“Socrates is to philosophy what Jesus is to religion.” So says Peter Kreeft, Boston College philosophy professor and popular Catholic thinker, in introducing his primer on Socratic thought.

It quickly becomes evident that Kreeft takes both Socrates and Jesus seriously. In fact, in some ways, he's like the early Church Fathers, who saw in ancient Greek philosophy what they called “seeds of the Word” — pagan reasoning that is, in many ways, compatible with Christian faith.

It's equally clear that he is a true philosopher — a lover of wisdom. As such, he is an apologist for philosophy as well as for the Catholic faith. Here's how he responds to the common contemporary conceit that “philosophy is impractical”:

“‘Philosophy bakes no bread,’ says the cynical cliché. To which Socrates would reply, as another wise man once did to the temptation to prefer ‘practical’ things like bread to wisdom, ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’ That man also uttered the most practical sentence ever spoken: ‘What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his soul?’ That is Socrates' point, too: Our most practical need is to be more than a pragmatist.”

To inspire in his readers a love for faith and philosophy — or for a philosophical faith, or a faith-based philosophy — Kreeft avoids telling about philosophy. Instead, imitating Socrates' methods, he shows how philosophy is “done.” It's not that Kreeft wants to produce clones of Socrates: The master knew his limitations; indeed, “knowing what you don't know” is Lesson One. For only when you're ready to jettison your intellectual baggage and admit your ignorance can you be a philosopher.

By way of showing what a philosopher does, Kreeft prepares us to engage in the philosophical enterprise ourselves. Being a philosopher is, after all, inescapable.

“To be human is to be challenged to philosophize, and if we respond by not philosophizing, then that is our philosophy, a bad one,” he writes. “Once Romeo proposes to Juliet, she is no longer innocent but involved, whether she answers Yes or No. Once we are rational, philosophy proposes to us, and we are no longer innocent.”

What a marvelous crash-course this is. It kept making me think back 25 years, to the days I sat in Philosophy 101. We got an anthology that dealt with philosophy's main problems. Each topic had five or six readings, culled from conflicting schools of philosophy. Instead of learning how philosophy is done, we got the impression that philosophy is a cacophony of conflicting opinions advocated by ideologues detached from real life. If only then we'd been exposed to a philosopher who left us at semester's end with the “outcomes objective” of learning how to think.

Hubris, you say? There's no putting the philosophical Humpty Dumpty back together again? Socrates' world was also marked by philosophical pluralism. As Kreeft points out, today's “modernists” have much in common with the pre-Socratics, while yesterday's Sophists and today's postmodernists and deconstructionists share real common ground. “There is nothing new under the sun,” he writes. “The Greeks invented just about every school of philosophy that would appear for the next two millennia.”

Meanwhile, it's not as if Kreeft quotes Socrates uncritically: He could hardly be a Socratic disciple if he did. He recognizes the problems in Socrates' depreciation of the body and his misunderstanding of death. He knows the dictum “evil is ignorance” can be misused. And he sees the problems in how Socrates speaks of the relation between the divine will and morality. But he also appreciates the man's panting after wisdom like a deer pants for water. And he's certainly well aware that we don't worship wisdom — we bow before its author.

Want to know how to be a philosopher? Read this book. Know a student heading for Philosophy 101? Put this book on his required reading list.

John M. Grondelski writes fromWarsaw, Poland.