Socrates Cafe

Socrates Café are gatherings around the world where people from different backgrounds get together and exchange philosophical perspectives based on their experiences.

Launched over twenty years ago by founder Christopher Phillips, Socrates Café has gone on to become an oasis of reasonableness in a desert of rising intolerance and fundamentalism around the world — from Montana to Mumbai, Portland to Tokyo. Hundreds of groups now convene far and wide in public places and spaces, including cyberspace, but also in bricks and mortar locales like schools, churches, community centers, nursing homes, prisons, shelters for homeless families, libraries.

Those who take part in Socrates Cafés share the sensibility of the fifth century BC philosopher Socrates that continual close encounters with others of a philosophical kind, engaging in impassioned yet thoughtful exchanges of ideas and ideals, is a portal to sculpting what the Greeks of old called Arête —all-around excellence, of a sort that is an individual and collective pursuit rolled into one.

As diverse and assorted people break philosophical bread together on a regular basis, close connections are often forged among the strangest bedfellows. If you were a fly on the wall at one of these gatherings, you’d see that Socrates Café-goers in action are an inquisitive, open, curious, and playful bunch —childlike, in a word. Christopher fond of saying that Socrates Café is for “children of all ages,” because these gatherings bring out our innate inquisitiveness and sense of wonder. 

Christopher Phillips - Socrates Cafe, 1996

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