Socrates On Trial

by Nigel Tubbs, Rowan Williams (Introduction)

Socrates On Trial tells of Socrates's return to a modern city that is plagued by prejudice, privilege and populism. On resuming his questioning in the agora he is arrested, interrogated by his prosecutors, questioned by his Judge, and confessed to by his inquisitor. On a Festival Day, he explores a new model for the just city --a city based not on mastery but on learning --before offering a new apology to the court that will, once again, decide his fate.

This new/old Socrates offers the city a renewed vision of justice by reconceptualizing the meaning and significance of thinking and education. From the force of Socratic questioning, he unfolds a different logic of truth, freedom, and justice. His conversations exert a gravitational force that draws key cultural elements of the city -- property, wealth, money, family, essence, gendered and racialized identities, production, distribution and consumption -- into its educational orbit.

At stake here is the vulnerability of modern democracy to authoritarian leaders and their sponsors. Influenced by sophisticated propaganda people's frustration with democracy is channeled into visceral anger on the one hand, and into disillusioned scepticism and cynicism on the other. Belief in truth and education collapses in exhaustion and fatigue, caught in the headlights of seemingly irresolvable and petrifying rational paradoxes that block all paths to social justice. Socrates On Trial , describing the return of Socrates to the modern city, heralds a new education for such a city.

320 pages, Hardcover

Published October 7, 2021

Reviews

[Igor]

A must read for anyone interested in philosophy and education.

[Rebekah Howes]

This is a remarkable and inspired story about the social and political life of the modern city and what Socrates would witness and think about the manifold inequalities, contradicitons and challenges that we face should he return. But it is really a story about education as the truth of the examined life of the city. It's about the possibilities of learning as a way of life for us as individuals and as societies/cities/communities. It is bold and difficult in its thinking at times but the difficulty is deeply rewarding if you stick with it. It's written in dialogue form which helps to sustain the pace of the ideas the book develops. It is certainly a book that students of Plato and philosophy would benefit from but i would recommend it to anyone who believes in the educational life as the route to knowing who we are and how we want to live.