 This page is an archive from the previous version of The Row Boat, which is why it doesn't look and work the same as the current version. However, these archives are fully functional and integrated with the new system.
Why does this site permit advertising?
Powered by Little Logger |
The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
The Genre of Dialog2/23/2007 12:05:46It is strange that since Plato's fundamental statement and those that followed in the ancient and late antique world, the form of the dialog has been superseded in philosophy by the treatise. What a peculiar contrivance the treatise forces one into - to take one narrow position even as we know that there are many, without which a question cannot possibly be understood. When will, once again, a debate be a valid philosophical statement? Of course it already is, in conferences, journals, and edited volumes. But in those, each writer is only one actor playing only one role. Perhaps that is all professional philosophers have become, partisans of a particular truth too narrow to possibly be true: actors. But the Platonic tradition seems to suggest: Only by encompassing the whole dialog, when one has become all of the actors, perhaps, might one be Philosopher. |
|
| |
