AKADEMIE FORUM: CARLOS FRAENKEL

Ancient philosophers believed that philosophy could indeed save us—and were willing to die and kill for that belief. Socrates tried to save his fellow citizens through argument and was executed for it. Plato drew a dark lesson from his teacher’s fate: rational persuasion is powerless in the face of deeply entrenched irrationality. Only violent social transformation—destroying a corrupt system and replacing it with a virtuous one—can rescue humanity from injustice. That conviction has echoed through modern revolutionary movements from Robespierre to the Rote Armee Fraktion. Unlike Plato and his revolutionary heirs, liberal societies distrust claims about the “true” good life and instead celebrate pluralism. Yet despite unprecedented freedom and prosperity, most people today clearly do not live happy and flourishing lives. Instead, we lurch from crisis to crisis—war, climate collapse, exploitation, political radicalization—without shared standards for what is worth pursuing.

This lecture asks an uncomfortable question: has liberalism’s refusal to seriously debate the good life made it complicit in the current state of the world? Revisiting Socrates and Plato, the lecture argues that the real alternative to Socratic pestering and Platonic coercion is not silence, but a radical democratization of philosophical judgment—an education that equips citizens to deliberate about value without turning disagreement into domination and politics into war.

Carlos Fraenkel is James McGill Professor of Philosophy and Religion at McGill University in Montreal and later this year will become director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. He was previously Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza: Reason, Religion, and Autonomy; Teaching Plato in Palestine: Philosophy in a Divided World; and the forthcoming Radical Ancients: Philosophy as Experiments in Living. His work approaches philosophy as a practical and critical activity, asking how it can shape individual lives, public culture, and democratic societies. He is widely engaged in public philosophy, and his essays have appeared in the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, New York Times, Boston Review, Dissent, Liberties, and other publications. At McGill, he teaches “The Good Life,” a popular undergraduate course on philosophical approaches to how we should live.

Presented in English
Featuring a musical contribution by students of the Barenboim-Said Akademie