Agnes Callard: belief

Transcript context

…Why is it that people read these dialogues? If it’s truly a conversational form, we could listen to them. You could teach your class by having people listen to a podcast of Crito and Socrates, Phaedrus and Socrates, but no one does that. You could put them on tape and release it. I think, actually, more people would listen to us. Why is that? What does it tell us about the nature of philosophy also? I think that certainly in the ancient world, they would have been spoken. But that doesn’t mean that’s the best way to receive them. It just means that there were certain limits at that time. My own feeling is, the ideal way to engage with the dialogues is to read them and then talk about them with people. Ideally, you talk about them with the text in front of you so you can quote bits and read bits out loud. It might depend on personally how you take in information or something. But I want to be able to stop, and I want to be in a kind of control over my thinking about the argument. A lot of the time what’s going on in the text is the presentation of an argument. One thing that must have appealed to Plato about the dialogue form is that there is no . . . I can’t think of any more direct way to just put propositions on paper, on parchment, whatever, on papyrus . . . Doesn’t it cause us to overrate propositions? But continue your answer.…

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