Platonic Dialogue

We believe Plato adopted a dramatic style of writing - the dialogue - to produce a particular effect upon and within his readers. Dr. Lane Cooper describes the process as follows:

"The type of writing which Plato chose for his medium of expression, the dialogue, is one that enables an author to approach the truth from various sides, and by gradual stages. In the preliminary stages the speakers may offer tentative expressions of the truth, or half-truths, or positive untruths. The argument advances by elimination of the false and a convergance upon whateversurvives the test of dialectic. The result may or may not be expressly stated in sober prose. In general we may believe that the ultimate truth is seldom reached in the discussion proper, but is finally caught together and embodied in ... the imaginative part of a whole (namely, the dialogue)."