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Dear Socrates
Dear Socrates
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,
I find you arrogant. Well, I don’t mean you personally, because I have never met you. But ‘you’ as a class of persons – the kind who are always demanding reasons for things. Isn’t dialectic really a form of interrogation? Why should other people have to explain themselves to you? Why isn’t it enough that they have their opinions? Can’t you just respect that? Don’t you want other people to respect your opinions? Why must everybody justify themselves to you and submit to your judgment?
Yours,
Elizabeth Bennet
Pemberley, Derbyshire
My dear Ms Bennet,
You make me feel the world has gone topsy-turvy. Here I am accustomed to engage in dialectic as an act of the profoundest humility, and you make it sound as if rationality itself were a kind of vice.
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