hose prime concern was with the discovery and transmission of truth on any matter open to the human intellect.
             For Socrates, the core philosophical skill was that of dialogue or dialectic - the art of progressing towards the truth through question-and-answer discussion. Nowadays we tend to think of a dialogue as a non-confrontational discussion, in which two or more parties try to achieve a compromise. But Socrates's method was far from non-confrontational, and I don't believe that his objective was compromise. He used his questioning to test and destruct the accounts put forward by different protagonists, and the process could prove emotionally painful and humiliating. What Socrates did was to adapt the a model to the pursuit of truth. Plato was motivated to distance Socrates from the sophists because of their reputation for perverting the truth for the sake of winning the argument. But Socrates believed that the met
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