Etiket: Why Didn’t Socrates Write?

The Primacy of the Dialectical Method: Socrates believed that the path to knowledge was face-to-face dialogue (dialectics). He viewed writing as a tool that “froze” thought and prevented questioning. In Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedrus, Socrates states that writing is “defenseless” because the reader cannot question the text. For him, true