Café Philosophy focuses on “intellectual and thought-provoking conversations between philosophers” in the “Socratic dialogue fashion,” as author M.A. Alsadah notes in the book’s preface.
As the story begins, narrator Avril Laviolette, a young, disillusioned primary teacher, is drinking tea in a Paris café when she meets a philosopher who is called Plato by his friends. Plato is, conveniently, a retired grade school teacher himself. Within minutes, the two are engaged in a complicated discussion of where her students acquired their personality traits and if she has any influence to change them.
The language becomes more formal when Plato’s philosopher friends join them for different café conversations, including a debate on who is better overall — a philosopher or a polymath. In the book’s longest chapter, the philosophers call upon the” Trivium,” the trinity of all ideas, to investigate the relationships between science, religion and philosophy, complete with diagrams.
At one point in such conversations, Avril thinks, “I never thought a mental exercise could be so entertaining.”
The average reader may not agree. Although the speakers sometimes stop to sip tea and exchange a few personal asides, the bulk of Café Philosophy is comprised of long, intellectual conversations that read more like a textbook than fiction. For example, at one point, a philosopher of religion named Hermes, explains: “Our friend, Plato, is speaking of higher universal truths here. Such truths are not susceptible to modern scientific methodology to prove their correctness or existence. Instead, they are known through their repeated patterns in the universe. Similar patterns include the golden mean, the golden spiral, the number two and the duality in creation.”
Readers will have differing levels of tolerance for such conversation. Nevertheless, the dialogues are clearly written, and the conclusions Alsadah draws for his fictional philosophers seem logical.
Readers who studied philosophy and wonder what the Socratic method would sound like today might enjoy this book. Others will find themselves yearning for less talk and more plot.