Quote:
Originally Posted by Sleeping in EQ
And he famously preferred orality...
From Phaedrus:
"this discovery of yours [script] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you will give your disciples not truth but only the semblance of truth: they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing: they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."
|
This is interesting. I am reading Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale and he spends some time at the beginning analogizing between written history and DNA tranmission, while shunting oral histories by comparison due to thier inaccuracy. I found his point easy to accept, but I thought he had given very short shrift to the value and possible accuracy of oral histories. Socrates apparenly agreed as to the value of learning and transmitting knowledge orally.