[somenameforme]

A slight tangent, but there's something extremely interesting on the topic of Ancient philosophers related to this Jobs' quote. Socrates wrote nothing down, to the point that some have claimed he was illiterate. And that is a possibility, though improbable.

But the reason he claimed to not want to write anything down is because, in a nutshell, 'books cannot defend themselves' : words can be taken out of context, meanings misconstrued, and text made to mean what the interpreter wants to make it mean instead of what the author meant for it to mean.

It's quite fortunate for the world that many of his students disagreed, but it's interesting nonetheless.

[hnfong]

A tangent on a tangent.

This is the first time I've read why Socrates didn't leave any writings. Which incidentally reminds me of a saying in Zen Buddhism of "do not establish words and letters" (see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_scriptures ) If you squint hard enough, Zen's preferred method of teaching via teacher-student interactions very vaguely resemble the Socratic method.

So I wonder whether there's any more-than-incidental connection between the two, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism -- i.e. was Zen Buddhism a very distant offshoot of the Socratic philosophy and methods?

(Sorry, might be too much of a tangent. But hey, Steve Jobs probably held Zen in high regard :D)

[Bakary]

There's no way to know if Socrates' absence would have led to a net benefit or not

Edit: to expand on this, we can say it is fortunate that his words were written down, but in a Socrates-less world or a world where his thoughts evaporated, you don't know which philosophers would have taken up the mantle instead and what the consequences would have been

[lupire]

Yes, no one can ever no anything about a counterfactual. So does nothing matter beyond whatever each individual chooses to matter? (Nihilism / Hedonism.)

[Bakary]

I meant more in the sense that we are primed to take one side of the issue by the default, the one we know. In the counter-factual Socrates-less world I'm describing, we are the unprovable counter-factual and people there are posting about how grateful they are that Eulogothenes' words were put to papyrus.

Perhaps a better way to illustrate this is to point out that the Mona Lisa's cultural prominence essentially ballooned once it was stolen.

[lupire]

It's a good point. Do any of his dialogues include the other side of the debate?

Did Plato ever speak about how we wants to communicate ideas to later generations? Maybe he didn't want to, and he trusted his students to preserve and improve his important ideas? How did he expect people far away in time and space to study philosophy without access to great thinkers? Did he not care? Did he expect every niche to reinvent philosophy from scratch?

Thomas Jefferson wanted the US Constitution to be rewritten by 1810, but we are still stuck with it today (with amendments, granted).

[bryanrasmussen]

>It's a good point. Do any of his dialogues include the other side of the debate?

oh sure, they include the other side, but amusingly enough the other side are always idiots.

[williamcotton]

It’s also quite unfortunate that the world needs to keep learning the basic lessons of media with every new communications technology.

The epistemological issues that Socrates had with the written word are not too dissimilar from the epistemological issues of contemporary social media.

[renewiltord]

Socbae dropping bombs about context collapse