RUTHFULLY YOURS

The quip referred to Plato’s failed attempt to put philosophy into practice. At the behest of a former pupil, the Athenian philosopher twice consented to travel to Syracuse to educate its ruler, Dionysius the Younger. “Ashamed lest I appear to myself as a pure theorist, unwilling to touch any practical task,” as Plato wrote in a letter, he decided that he could not pass up the chance to show the usefulness of his teachings. In the end, Dionysius’ taste for tyranny proved stronger than his appetite for the pursuit of truth. After escaping arrest, a much chastened Plato returned from Syracuse to the Academy in Athens.

Carlos F raenkel, a student of medieval Jewish and Islamic philosophy who now teaches at McGill University in Montreal, similarly decided to test his conviction that philosophy can be put to use outside of the walls of the academy. Between 2006 and 2011, he taught philosophy to students in a variety of countries and cultures: to undergraduates at Al Quds University; graduate students at Alauddin State Islamic University in Indonesia; conflicted Hasidic Jews in New York City; high-school students in northeast Brazil; and Native Americans on a Mohawk reservation on the U.S.-Canadian border.

ENLARGE

Mr. Fraenkel’s discerning account of these experiences shapes what he calls an “intellectual travelogue.” The tour opens with an attempt to reclaim for his Muslim students thinkers from their own tradition who interpreted Islam in philosophical terms. He leads them through discussions of Abu Bakr al-Razi, a polymath born in the ninth century who referred to Socrates as “my Imam,” and of al-Farabi, the 10th-century Islamic philosopher who, by reconciling reason and revelation, granted validity to other faiths.

Like Plato, Mr. Fraenkel soon enough encounters the effects of political intimidation and the fears of free thinking. He co-teaches his seminar at Al Quds with the university president, Sari Nusseibeh, long vilified as a traitor for forging contacts with Israelis. Mr. Nusseibeh had been assaulted by masked Palestinian students in 1987 at Birzeit University on the West Bank moments after finishing a lecture on liberalism and tolerance. “So it’s not surprising that I never see him without his bodyguards,” Mr. Fraenkel writes. “They inspect the classroom before he comes in and guard the door during class.”

When Mr. Fraenkel, who describes himself an atheist, challenges students in Indonesia to ponder whether Islam is compatible with pluralism and democracy, he comes up against the limits on free inquiry in a country where the first of five founding principles of the constitution requires the belief in one God and where religious scholars impose a monolithic understanding of Islam. “The paradox,” an Indonesian academic tells him, “is that only Western universities provide the intellectual freedom to study the rich and dynamic Islamic tradition in all its manifestations.”

In a chapter titled “ Spinoza in Shtreimels,” Mr. Fraenkel confronts a different kind of fear. Borrowing a phrase from the historian Yirmiyahu Yovel, he calls the ultra-Orthodox students of his clandestine seminar, conducted in a lounge in SoHo, “modern-day Marranos of reason: God-fearing Jews in public, freethinkers in secret.” Together they read the heretical Jewish philosopher Spinoza and the 11th-century Muslim thinker al-Ghazali, both of whom suffered a crisis of faith. Here philosophy represents a theological threat more than a political one. “From the point of view of our community,” one of his students says, “studying these books is much worse than having an extramarital affairs or going to a prostitute. That’s weakness of the flesh, but here our souls are on the line.”

In Brazil, where a 2008 law mandates the incorporation of philosophy into the public-school curriculum, Mr. Fraenkel’s students prove eager to apply ideas of social justice to their own deeply unjust society. The members of the Mohawk community he teaches are also keen to use insights into self-determination and private property to inform their efforts to heal their own fractures and reclaim lost land.

Many of the classroom conversations, Mr. Fraenkel concedes, remain inconclusive, but fruitfully so. What unites them is his skill in the art of posing questions designed to perplex and provoke. He lets us overhear the Socratic form of dialogue that Plato invented and that Mr. Fraenkel practices much to his students’ pleasure, and ours.

Taken in aggregate, what do these disparate groups of students teach their teacher? In the second and shorter part of “Teaching Plato in Palestine,” Mr. Fraenkel moves from travelogue to a spirited defense of philosophy as a language of public reason universal enough to cut across cultural and religious boundaries and eloquent enough to address what he calls “tensions that arise from diversity.” Rather than allowing us to shelter behind cultural relativism, he argues, philosophy subjects our own beliefs to critical scrutiny, thus enhancing our capacity to articulate our convictions to ourselves and to others.

Unlike the disillusioned Plato, Mr. Fraenkel returns from his travels with renewed faith in the wide promise of philosophy. One hopes that, for all the tyranny and fear in the world today, the author’s faith continues to fare better than his predecessor’s and that his almost prayerful aspiration for philosophy’s transformative power isn’t drowned out by the din of the loudspeakers.

Mr. Balint, a writer living in Jerusalem, taught at Al Quds University from 2011 to 2014.