Dear Socrates

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Having returned from the turn of the Fourth Century B.C. to the turn of the Twenty-First A.D., Socrates has eagerly signed on as a Philosophy Now columnist so that he may continue to carry out his divinely-inspired dialogic mission.

Dear Socrates,

The heart of your dialectical method seems to be the detection and elimination of contradiction. You draw out incompatible assertions from your interlocutors and then challenge them to reconcile their own thoughts. I was wondering: Do you ever perform this operation on yourself?

Yours,
Abram Katz

Dear Abram,

You have hit the nail on the head. I hardly know where to begin my response to your excellent question because absolutely everything hangs on it.

I agree with you that the heart of my critical method has been the exposing of contradictions in people’s own beliefs and assumptions.

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