So Socrates Was Right

A nice reflection here on the traditional position that philosophy, the pursuit of wisdom, best occurs in the context of conversation, and on how new technologies can aid in a recovery of certain aspects of such dialogic philosophizing. I can’t go the whole Socratic hog in the privileging of orality over textuality (neither could Plato, nor the writer of this piece), but there is more than historical accident to the literary form that many philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Boethius, etc.) have employed; those written conversations can point the way toward how real ones should be conducted.