“Although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.”In The Case Against Travel the philosopher Agnes Callard launches a vigorous assault on the idea that there is something transformative or ennobling about recreational travel. Going well beyond commonplace complaints about the irksomeness of tourist...

**A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice“Charming, intelligent.… Open Socrates encourages us to recognize how little we know, and to start thinking.” ?Jennifer Szalai,?New York Times Book ReviewAn iconoclastic philosopher revives Socrates for our time, showing how we can answer—and, in the first place, ask—life’s most important questions.**Socrates has been hiding in plain sight. We call him the father of Western philosophy, but what...

Becoming someone is a learning process; and what we learn is the new values around which, if we succeed, our lives will come to turn. Agents transform themselves in the process of, for example, becoming parents, embarking on careers, or acquiring a passion for music or politics. How can such activity be rational, if the reason for engaging in the relevant pursuit is only available to the person one will become? How is it psychologically possible to feel the attraction of a form of concern ...

Anger looms large in our public lives. Should it?Reflecting on two millennia of debates about the value of anger, Agnes Callard contends that efforts to distinguish righteous forms of anger from unjust vengeance, or appropriate responses to wrongdoing from inappropriate ones, are misguided. What if, she asks, anger is not a bug of human life, but a feature—an emotion that, for all its troubling qualities, is an essential part of being a moral agent in an imperfect world? And if ange...

An iconoclastic philosopher revives Socrates for our time, showing how we can answer—and, in the first place, ask—life’s most important questions.Socrates has been hiding in plain sight. We call him the father of Western philosophy, but what exactly are his philosophical views? He is famous for his humility, but readers often find him arrogant and condescending. We parrot his claim that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” yet take no steps to live examined o...