Socrates Philosophy for Everyday Life

You have read Marcus Aurelius and Seneca, and you keep meeting the same name in their pages. They call Socrates their teacher, yet all you really know is that he drank hemlock and asked a lot of questions.

This audiobook gives you the man himself. Each short chapter opens inside a documented scene, the barefoot soldier at Potidaea, the arguments in the Athenian market, the falling-out with Alcibiades, the trial before five hundred citizens, the last morning in the cell. From that scene one idea is drawn out and traced honestly through Plato and Xenophon, with the places where scholars disagree marked plainly. Then it is carried to a nurse, a teacher or a founder facing the same question today. Every chapter closes with one Socratic practice you can run in your head while walking, and a single line to remember.

By the end you will know why the Stoics kept returning to this awkward, cheerful man, and you will have a small set of questions that make your own thinking clearer. Put in your earphones, start walking, and let Socrates ask the first one.