"Examined Lives": The secret lives of philosophers:
Plato has Socrates say, in the "Apology," that the unexamined life is not worth living. Many of Socrates' successors took this saying to heart, regarding the examination of life as definitive of their calling. With "Examined Lives," a set of beautifully written and richly informative mini-biographies of a dozen philosophers, James Miller explores what this meant to each of them. His conclusion is a negative one: the combination of wisdom, self-understanding and self-possession that Socrates' successors took to be the gold standard for the philosophical life proved impossible for most of them to attain, and, in some cases, what they preached and what they practiced fell widely apart.