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by ictoan 3085 days ago
If you read the article, it did mention Socrates warned about writing. Maybe Plato did say it as well.

Anyways, your point was brought up in the article.

Did you read the article?

4 comments

> If you read the article, it did mention Socrates warned about writing. Maybe Plato did say it as well.

All the saying attributed to Socrates are by way of Plato's writing in which Socrates is used as a mouthpiece, and are more properly attributed to Plato. So, the references are probably to the same thing.

This is absolutely strictly correct but I think (in the Phaedrus) it's accepted that the injunction against writing thing is Socrates' idea (because Plato's work survives to this day in written form – Plato wrote stuff down) but that the injunction against art/theatre/drama (is it?) is all Plato's and is to be found in the Republic, the reason being that that which is representational is twice removed from the truth or something like that.

But you probably already know all this. So for the benefit of others.

Well, yeah, it's pretty hard to take seriously the idea that Plato adhered to an injunction against writing (given how we have access to his written works), but quite plausible that Socrates did (since we have access to him only through Plato's written works.)
This claim is, at best, highly contested: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/#HisSocEarMidLatDia.
I read that part and saw how they stated it and then totally dismissed it. "This time is different" and lets keep going on with our talking points with studies that we spin/abuse and other things which aren't backed up at all.
> Did you read the article?

I did not. :( Turns out that not only Plato is too curmudgeonly to read things. Perhaps if I had a longer attention span from not using my cell phone too much, I could have read it.

Nope, I've got too much scrolling to do. These headlines aren't going to read themselves.