Maybe I'm inhabiting a fantasy world, but I'd thought dialogues were pretty damn popular in post-Plato ancient Greece and then Rome. In fact, Aristotle wrote dialogues. Come to think of it, so did David Hume, Fichte and Berkeley.
Chris Doss The Russia Journal ----------------------------
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 20:58:00 -0800 From: Bradford DeLong <jbdelong at uclink.berkeley.edu> Subject: Re: Nietzsche and the Nazis (Was Re: aesthetics)
>Brad wrote:
>>
>>
>>A competent philosopher writes in such a way as to make it
>>hard--not easy--for misreaders...
>
>Nothing is easier than misreading. No philosopher is more competent
>than Plato, and none more aware of the propensity to misread,
>but none has been more misread, and in more different ways.
>
>Shane Mage
And the dialogue form was rapidly abandoned after Plato because it proved so vulnerable to misreading...