Big fan of Philosophy, not a big fan of Agnes Callard. I love Socrates as much as the next person, but there have been millennia of philosophical inquiry since.
I hate the trend among public intellectuals to pick some ancient figure and then project all modern questions and anxieties onto them. You end up not learning much about Socrates, but much about Agnes Callard.
I'll take modern academic philosophy with all its jargon and impenetrability over the simplistic parables of Callard.
I don't know anything about Agnes or their work, but I agree that such a general trend exists. There is a whole cottage industry of self-professed self-help gurus that make their money by presenting a lazy, straight reading of e.g. the stoics (ignoring any actual academic research) and repackaging their work as mantras to get you through your nine to five—oh but, no don't develop a critical consciousness about society please, just accept the current structure without question and repeat these dumbed down versions of the "ancient wisdom" and keep buying my books, thanks! It's a complete bastardization of the real heart of philosophy, and I really dislike such grifters.
The real heart of philosophy is that it is an academic discipline that attempts to formalize a method of inquiry that is by nature iconoclastic and resistant to definitive answers. Philosophy also attempts to create rigor in an area where, unlike some other academic fields, most humans can do it, but most do it very poorly (myself included).
I hate the trend among public intellectuals to pick some ancient figure and then project all modern questions and anxieties onto them. You end up not learning much about Socrates, but much about Agnes Callard.
I'll take modern academic philosophy with all its jargon and impenetrability over the simplistic parables of Callard.