The St. Austin Review

Sample Article: Meeting Socrates: Educating Modern Philosophers

Have any of you faithful readers of Peter Kreeft’s many, many books ever wondered what it would be like to attend his philosophy

course at Boston College? Save yourself ninety grand in freshman fees, and cough up instead a hundred bucks, plus or minus (Word on Fire lists it now at ninety-seven on their website), for his eight-volume inquisition of modern thought.

Reprinting the original Socrates Meets series from Ignatius Press (and St. Augustine’s), Word on Fire packs together Kreeft’s fanciful critique of post-classical philosophy into a handsome white, red, and gold box that will stretch only five and three-quarters inches (fourteen centimeters on the Continent) across your Greats shelf. Since Socrates is the main character in these dialogues, the conceit takes the last four hundred years of big brains back two millennia. The result is a leisurely cram-course, sprightly but pointed, illuminating, and a little annoying, like the gadfly himself: Kreeft imagining Socrates in dialogue with Machiavelli, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Kierkegaard, Marx, Freud, and Sartre. Get ready for terse definitions and close reasoning, with enthymemes here in place of the much longer syllogisms (and minus Kreeft’s self-described bad puns).