Abstract
This essay discusses the critique of writing that Socrates presents in Plato’s Phaedrus. It argues that because he conceives of writing as a kind of technology (in Greek, a technê), this passage prefigures many of the conversations now taking place about our own most recent technological advances: the internet, the smartphone, and artificial intelligence.
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Notes
All translations from Plato are my own.
Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, translated by Pamela Mensch (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies. (Routledge, 1947).
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