In Plato’s Symposium, a young Alcibiades, loudly drunk, recounts a charming story about our father of Western philosophy. One morning, Alcibiades relates, Socrates became so fixed in thought that he remained standing in one place all day and throughout the night, pondering; it was only the next morning at dawn that he broke from his reverie, offered a prayer, and continued his walk. This image of Socrates embodies the popular—and perhaps misguided—notion of the philosopher’s role: the unique commitment to focused thought, a concentrated reflection which can appear akin to intellectual clairvoyance.

But on that night of uninterrupted calculation, what exactly was Socrates thinking? Socrates’ almost mystic apprehension of the world of Forms may contribute to the inaccurate idealization of the philosopher as one who can access an indefinable realm of human cognition. Nevertheless, the image of Socrates motionless on a winter night points to an inescapable question: what do we think about when we think about philosophy?

Socrates himself may have an answer: the philosopher, he alleges in Phaedo, orders “intellectual vision” to come as close as possible to the essence of things. Our very own Philip Kitcher reminds us of this when he states that philosophers excel at “anatomy.”

The authors in this issue of The Gadfly all, in some way, seek to grasp the essence buried inside outer form, the reality hidden behind appearance. They all anatomize: whether their subject be a complex novel, a work of art, a musical composition, or even something so elusive as emotional attachment. Through them, The Gadfly seeks to apply the perceptive tools of philosophy to the experiences of everyday life. In this way the Socratic epiphany does not seem so impossibly distant; it is not some unknown event reserved for the few. Instead, philosophy serves us all best as the road towards understanding the structures that lie beneath the surface of experience.

Puya Gerami

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