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Socrates: A Life Worth Living - Paperback | Diverse Reads

Socrates: A Life Worth Living

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A lively and accessible introduction to the quintessential philosopher, and the civilized world’s first enemy of the state.

Named a Best Teen & YA Nonfiction title of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews

Socrates: A Life Worth Living traces the life and ideas of one of Western Civilization’s founding philosophers, whose influence is still felt more than two thousand years later. Socrates is famous for how he died, executed by the Athenian government for corrupting the youth of Athens, but his most important contribution was to challenge the people around him to test their ideas and beliefs in conversation with each other, in the belief that in this way we could become a society that knows the difference between truth and falsehood, and find what makes a life worthwhile. He did not claim to have definitive answers, but he knew that knowledge was the key to finding them, and he invited everyone he met to join him in his quest. 
 
The Socratic Method is the first, and still the best, method for distinguishing truth from falsehood. In Socrates: A Life Worth Living, award-winning author Devra Lehmann gives us the first biography for young readers of the thinker who has seen no equal.

ISBN-13: 9781644212615

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Triangle Square

Publication Date: 02-20-2024

Pages: 400

Age Range: 13 - 17 Years

Series: Philosophy for Young People

DEVRA LEHMANN is the author of Spinoza: The Outcast Thinker, which won the 2014 National Jewish Book Award for Children’s and Young Adult Literature. In her 35 years in the classroom, she has taught preschoolers to sound out monosyllables, high schoolers to read Shakespeare, and adults to parse Talmudic passages. She is now at work on a young adult biography of Augustine of Hippo.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Prologue xiii

Part 1 The Path to the Questions

Chapter 1 The City of Gods and Humans 3

Chapter 2 The Way to Citizenship 17

Chapter 3 The Young Intellectual 33

Chapter 4 The Nature of Reality 41

Chapter 5 Questions for an Age of Humanism 55

Part 2 Asking the Questions

Chapter 6 The Growth of a Following 65

Chapter 7 The Sophists 81

Chapter 8 Knowledge and Morality 101

Chapter 9 The Democracy and the Spartan Alternative 111

Chapter 10 Athens on the Ascent 125

Chapter 11 Potidaea and the Welcome Return 143

Chapter 12 Crisis and Cruelty 155

Chapter 13 Definitions of Courage 160

Chapter 14 The Clouds 179

Chapter 15 Family and Divine Mission 191

Chapter 16 Melos, Alcibiades, and the Teachability of Virtue 205

Chapter 17 The Conscientious Objector 229

Part 3 The Last Days

Chapter 18 The Charges and the Question of Piety 245

Chapter 19 The Trial 261

Chapter 20 Sentencing and Imprisonment 283

Chapter 21 The Fatal Drink 305

Epilogue 315

Notes 319

A Note on the Sources 343

Bibliography 347

Glossary 351

Index 361

Maps

Mainland Greece and the Aegean with inset of Attica xii

The city of Athens 16

Highlights of the Agora toward the end of Socrates's life 32

The Long Walls of Ancient Athens 157