Be a Philosopher (or Speed Date One)
Nothing is timelier than making time for asking untimely questions
By Tim Leberecht
A few days before the World Beautiful Business Forum, philosophy curator Eda Çaça and I shared a taxi ride. When the taxi was passing the Lyceum, Aristotle’s school situated on the margins of central Athens—a short walk from the iconic, recently reopened Hilton, so towering that locals colloquially named the entire neighborhood after the hotel—the driver turned around and asked whether we knew what the site to our right was about. We did, and told him that, in fact, we had visited just a few months earlier.
He was keen to continue the conversation.
“Did you know that Socrates lived in Pangrati?” he asked, referring to the neighborhood where he had picked us up.
“What? Really?”
The taxi driver turned melancholic.
“I was a professor of economics, but if I could do it all over again, I would study philosophy. Philosophy is the most important thing in life. When you sit on your deathbed and look back at your life, how can you forgive yourself for not having devoted enough time, again and again, to asking the questions that really matter?”
Eda and I looked at each other and nodded emphatically. We told him that she had studied philosophy, and he laughed.
“I attract people like you like flies,” he said. “All the philosophers end up in my taxi. This is the philosophy taxi!”
This is always where I wanted to be.
Overthink everything!
Since adolescence, philosophy has been my escape. As a high-school student, I remember the extracurricular classes I took and the ensuing animated discussions with classmates, fueled by far too much paper-cup coffee, about Buber, Derrida, Levinas, Heidegger, and, of course, the old Greeks. Their solitary thoughts made me feel less alone.
When I got home, I’d spend hours browsing through the Great Philosophers encyclopedia from my parents’ bookshelf (though they never read it, they were members of a book club). I was particularly enamored with Ludwig Wittgenstein, the most enigmatic of philosophers, this mathematician of words:
“If people never did silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”
“I am my world.”
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
I understood little, if anything, of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, but that incomprehension was very much the source of my attraction.
We all know that the why-questions of our youth—beginning with us as “philosophical babies,” to borrow from Alison Gopnik’s book of the same name—wane as we grow older. They are systematically trained out of us as we are conditioned to become high-performing, highly productive workers for whom the what and the how take precedence.
And so it is no surprise: society educates us to become members of a society that rewards us for being good members of that very society. What that—and any—society does not reward are contrarians who think differently. Take Socrates, who was sentenced to death for impiety and corrupting the youth, and drank a lethal dose of poison hemlock.
Thinking differently is precisely the point of philosophy, and why it matters more than ever today.
Philosophy is an invitation to think independently, to think dangerously, to think so much that it means overthinking everything: turning over every stone, suspecting a metaphysical conspiracy, sensing a deeper meaning behind every object.
In that sense, philosophy is anarchy.
It is disobeying the rules, an act of intellectual and metaphysical resistance against the tyranny of the physical and material; a practice of world-building, of constructing alternative worlds in order to make sense of this one and only world that we share with so many other species.
Department of Depth, fast and furious
It is impossible to be in Athens and not think of philosophy, even though Athens is not—and I say this with great affection—a well-thought-out city, but rather a beautiful mess that has grown organically and is far too alive to squander its time with the big, existential questions of life. Or is it?
In any case, both Athens and philosophy are having a moment. They were off the map and are now objects of desire once again.
This was one of the reasons why for the World Beautiful Business Forum in Athens—“the most human gathering for the more-than-human world”—we asked Eda Çaça to curate a dedicated philosophy program track. We called it the “Department of Depth,” and much to my surprise, it became one of the event’s most popular.
At the Department of Depth, philosophy and pleasure formed a joyful pair:
Hannah Arendt scholar Roger Berkowitz made the case for friendship over truth and justice.
Posthumanist activist Bayo Akomolafe, in a 45-minute freestyle solo performance delivered with his trademark stand-up-comedian cadence, described “completion” as the original colonial sin of modernity. “Masculinity is the completion of the human body,” he contended. And “AI is the completion of intelligence.”
Tech-philosopher-of-the-hour Carissa Véliz reminded us that there is no neutral, “god-given” technology and raised our prophecy literacy by arguing that predictions have always been instruments of power rather than genuine searches for knowledge: “Making a prediction that sounds like a fact—if you convince people that that’s the future—is actually a way of creating the future you want.”
Moreover, all fifteen philosophers present lined up to examine the quintessential question of “what is a good life in the age of AI?” together with a deeply engaged audience. It was a bold experiment in unstructured, moderator-less, self-organized deliberation that exposed both the power and the friction of collective real-time thinking, including the tensions created by strong personalities and strong opinions.
A silent, three-minute, Pina Bausch-inspired segment on the main stage featured several of those philosophers simply thinking in public, while futurist monk and interbeing scholar Shoukei Matsumoto gently swept the stage floor with a broom.
The program also included a discussion about new—and old—myths; a poetic immersion in “what it means to be human” with Kenneth Mikkelsen and Sonja Kresojevic; an excursion to the Pnyx, the birthplace of democracy, with Plato Academy director Christoph Quarch; and a “Dying Minutes” walk to contemplate the nearing end of the festival—and, more generally, the end of everything—with the founder of Interactional Ethics, Maxime Rovere.
There was also a “confrontation” between Rovere and João Sevilhano on “How to Meet an Idiot;” a bilateral Greek-Turkish discussion about the possibility of a region-specific “Aegean Intelligence,” featuring Nikos Erinakis, Zeynep Direk, Despina Papadopoulos, and others; and “love robots” as embodied, experimental discourse on the patterns of love, created by the Philosophy Machines studio of Papadopoulos and her partner Kevin Walker.
The highlight, for both philosophers and attendees alike, was arguably the program’s most original and daring format: a Philosophical Speed-Dating Rave. It offered participants the opportunity to go deep, quickly, in one-on-one exchanges with philosophers through short, TikTok-like bursts of interaction, all staged on a rooftop overlooking the Acropolis and accompanied by performance artist Lori Baldwin and the club sounds of Discotopian.
Emblematic of the entire program, it was less a symposium than an interdisciplinary, hedonistic philosophy party: playful, mischievous, and sweaty. Berghain meets Agora.
“The big existential questions are no longer the luxury of intellectuals; they are existential.”
For Eda, the mastermind behind these sessions, both the meaning of philosophical discourse and the philosopher’s role have changed over time.
She believes that:
“In our present age, where culture, attention, and even thought itself have become Instagrammed, philosophy assumes a renewed urgency. As we cannot keep pace with the rhythm of the world we have created, and meaning is being supplanted by LLMs, we imagined a philosophy program that brings people together to think differently about the questions that concern us all, reclaiming public spaces of shared thought and encounter. The philosophy track at the Forum emerged from that desire: thinking together, while remembering that thinking is also a bodily act.”
She continued:
“Philosophy was born in the public space, not in conference halls; between bodies, voices, tensions, questions, and encounters. It is humanity’s most extraordinary invention for understanding the ‘now’ not merely as a moment in time, but as a shared space inhabited by embodied subjects. After all, it is an invitation to a dance.”
It is important to remember that ethos at a moment when Silicon Valley is seeking to co-opt and colonize philosophy, extracting its insights and turning them into data; when it reduces philosophy to the empty utilitarian formulas of Effective Altruism; when it invites philosophers onto stages for “thought-provoking” fireside chats about AI and what it means to be human.
When philosophy becomes “effective” or merely “thought-provoking,” the love of wisdom that originated with the pre-Socratic thinkers of ancient Greece in the sixth century BCE—and that remains at the heart of philosophy today—dies.
Philosophers are either radical thinkers or they are not philosophers at all.
The good news is that the renewed demand for philosophy, far beyond the orbit of tech titans, is real and pertinent. As AI accelerates and our species confronts the possibility of extinction, the big existential questions are no longer the luxury of intellectuals; they are existential:
Why are we here?
What is right, and what is wrong?
What is a good life?
Where do I end and you begin?
What is the meaning of life?
Is there a god?
The thickening
Neuroscientist, bestselling author, and podcast host Sam Harris contends that the humanities—and philosophy in particular—represent the most future-proof education available.
Maureen Dowd, in her New York Times op-ed “What A.I. Kant Do,” even exhibits a certain Schadenfreude: “Who needs code anymore? AI does that for you.”
Critical, independent thinking, she argues, may be the one remaining human advantage. She cites Daniela Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic:
“Studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever. A lot of these models are actually very good at STEM. But this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human—understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick—I think that will always be really, really important.”
Leon Wieseltier, editor of the journal Liberties, would agree, though he rejects Big Tech’s sudden embrace of the humanities. “Tech is the single most powerful force ever arrayed against the humanities,” he told Dowd. “There is a huge difference between knowledge and information, and these asinine people have taught our population that all knowledge can be reduced to information.”
And further: “Press a button, you get your answer. So the whole humanistic mentality of mystery, obscurity, patience, beauty—it’s the opposite of what this technology has inculcated.”
This is why philosophy is the most critical work of our time—in every sense of the word “critical.”
It is our bulwark against, our active opposition to, and our most powerful weapon for overcoming tech supremacy and its power grabs disguised as algorithmic “predictions.”
In Athens, novelist Aditi Khorana appeared as the “oracle from the future” and told the 1,000 humans in the audience:
“What you are living through now will later be called ‘the thinning.’ Not collapse. Not catastrophe. Thinning. Less birds. Less touch. Less memory held in the body. More records. More storage. More proof of something that had once been alive.”
Philosophy is the antidote.
“Whereas the non-philosopher is always in a hurry when he is talking; he has to speak with one eye on the clock,” the philosopher “makes time for untimely questions,” just like Socrates did, Agnes Callard writes in Open Socrates.
Thinking is thickening. Thinking is THE thickening.
So, to echo the clarion call Carissa Véliz issued in Athens:
Be a philosopher.
And indeed, be a philosopher, or not be at all.
***
Ten Philosophical Concepts That Originated In and Around Athens
By Eda Çaça
These concepts have been with us for centuries. They live in a shared memory. They emerged in and around Athens, where we just now gathered again. At a time when our ways of living, working, and governing feel increasingly unstable, let’s revisit them as living questions: What new possibilities might emerge if we learn to think with them again? What might shift in how we relate to truth, desire, work, and one another, as humans in a more-than-human world?
Derived from lethe, the river of forgetting: un-forgetfulness. A related meaning is unconcealment, coming into the open. At its core, truth is an act. For Plato, it is a state in which the distinctions between knowing, being, and doing dissolve—something not quite possible in this world.
Where do you feel the distance between knowing and doing most strongly?
What in your life remains true even when ignored?
How is truth connected to your life?
What might be asking to come into the open—and what keeps it concealed?
The root of the modern word “technology,” techne refers to a form of embodied knowledge: the skill of making, of bringing something into being. In techne, knowledge is inseparable from the movement of the hand. It is a way of knowing that only exists in doing.
When was the last time you noticed that what you were making was also transforming you?
Where has skill quietly turned into automation?
What part of your work still requires your full presence, and AI is not helping?
What, in your life, feels like an art?
Ethos is the root of the word ethics. In Ancient Greek, êthos (with a long ê) refers to disposition, habit, and character, while ethos (with a short e) means custom; both derive from the verb ethô, “to be accustomed.” For Aristotle, virtues of character are acquired through habit—hence their name—and even musical modes were thought to shape one’s ethos. Ethos also recalls Heraclitus’s famous saying, “êthos anthrôpôi daimôn,” suggesting that a person’s character is their fate—and their fate their character. We have the power to change our ethos, our fate.
Is there a behavior in your work that has become habitual?
Which of your habits feels chosen—and which inherited?
How does your character show itself under pressure?
What do you think the ethos of the world is?
Eros is not so much what we want as the movement that displaces us. It disrupts comfort, redirects us, compels risk. It is the unsettling energy that propels life forward. As a god, sacred Eros is always present wherever relation is sought—even when the god himself is forgotten, ignored, trampled, devalued, or worshipped in contradictory ways. Music is erotic; prayer is erotic; violence is erotic; language is erotic… the list is endless, because the gods are endless.
Is there a desire that has been troubling you lately but refuses to leave?
Has any desire been quietly reshaping your life without you fully noticing?
Where does comfort resist your longing?
What has desire cost you—and what has made it possible?
The act of bringing something into being that did not exist before. In poiesis, what comes forth also transforms the one who brings it forth. Creation multiplies becoming, not outcomes.
How much does what you produce change you?
What have you created unintentionally?
When does making feel like unfolding rather than finishing?
What would it mean to create without measuring the result?
Paideia refers to education, culture, and personal formation. In Ancient Greece, it described an educational and cultural system aimed at cultivating virtuous, knowledgeable, and morally developed individuals. Learning is not the accumulation of information, but becoming someone else.
Who is your work turning you into?
What have you had to unlearn to grow?
Where are you being formed without noticing it?
Which encounters have shaped you more than any curriculum?
Not perfection, but appropriateness. Arete is living in accordance with one’s potential. Here, being “good” is not a goal, but a stance.
Where do “being successful” and “being in place” diverge for you?
When do you feel most in your element?
What does excellence look like when unmeasured?
Where might doing less allow you to act more appropriately?
Logos is often translated as reason, but it is also speech, relation, proportion, account. It gathers and connects. Logos gives form to what would otherwise remain scattered. It is the movement that articulates—and in articulating, binds. But logos does not only clarify. It also selects, orders, and leaves things out. To speak is always also to exclude. Logos is more than logic; it is the act of making something shareable—and in doing so, shaping what can appear at all.
When do your words conceal?
What in your life remains without language?
When do you speak to connect, and when to control?
What do you think is unshareable?
A daimon is not a demon. It is a guiding presence—neither fully divine nor merely human. It is a voice that does not tell us what to do, but warns us when not to act. Daimon names that subtle orientation that feels like “mine,” yet exceeds me. It interrupts.
Have you ever ignored an inner hesitation?
What kind of work feels aligned with something deeper than ambition?
When do you feel guided rather than driven?
What is not mortal about you?
Thanatos is a limit. Every form exists because something else does not. Mortality gives contour to meaning. Without finitude, there is no urgency, no measure, no care. Death is not only an end. It is the condition of value.
What do you think is the most urgent matter?
Where do you behave as if time were unlimited?
If you had to redefine death, how would you go about it?
What are you not allowing to end?
***
“Open Socrates”: More Thinking Together
To celebrate the German translation of Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, the widely acclaimed new book by Agnes Callard, Eda Çaça and her Atlas Publishing Lab are bringing their Başka Felsefe (“Another Philosophy”) series to Germany for two special events supported by the House of Beautiful Business.
Wednesday, June 10, 2026, 4-6 pm
What Is a Good Life? — A Socratic dialogue between Agnes Callard and Markus Gabriel
Conference Room of the International Center for Philosophy NRW (IZPH), Bonn
Sunday, June 14, 2026, 4-6 pm
What Is a Good Life? — A Socratic dialogue between Agnes Callard and Berislav Marušić
Reethaus, Berlin
More Upcoming Events
On June 16-17, the School of Founders at IESE Business School invites 300 founders of scaleups from 50+ nationalities to the Founders Forum—a two-day gathering in Barcelona that goes deeper than most startup conferences and looks at the founder’s journey through the lens of presence, personal transformation, and co-creation. We are delighted to contribute with live music by Mark Aanderud and a keynote by our co-founder Tim Leberecht.
Our next HoBB event will take place in Paris on June 24-25 in partnership with Pullman Hotels & Resorts. As part of the Pullman xChange event series we are inviting you to uncover The Source Code behind everything that we value in work and life. For 24 hours, Pullman hotels in Paris become an immersive landscape of encounters and experiences. 150 guests. By invitation only.
The Beautiful Business School is a one-of-a-kind online learning journey that provides you with a comprehensive, decidedly humanist playbook for the age of AI. Over the course of seven weeks—September 8–November 3—you’ll embark on a deep, dynamic journey into the art and practice of beautiful business. Through live sessions, expert guidance, improv, a curated library, and interaction with AI agents and a vibrant global community of peers, you’ll develop the creative insight and human leadership needed to shape a more beautiful future.
thank you for the 10 concepts! We'll do it with Hungarian WBBF Team as a thinking exercise. And I'm doing the homework Maxime gave me during the speed date!