Philosophers

Is there a particular reason that Socrates chose to present his work in the form of dialogues (as opposed to, say, essays)?

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The dialogues we read today were written by Socrates' student, Plato. Socrates was a teacher who believed that debate and discussion were the only ways to arrive at knowledge or, at least, to recognise ignorance. So, Socrates didn't write books of any kind. Plato's dialogues are a kind of compromise: they are written down, but written down as debates and discussions, and presumably designed to stimulate thought in the reader in a way that is at least akin to the face to face teaching of Socrates. (In the Phaedrus, one of the Socratic dialogues by Plato, a rather compelling argument against writing can be found.)

It is usually assumed that Plato's earliest works are pretty close representations of Socrates' techniques and ideas, and that later works are in Plato's own voice, so to speak. However, since the dating of the dialogues involves considerable guesswork, this is difficult to establish. Plato probably wrote treatises on philosophical topics along the model of other Greek works, but none of these have survived.

Not insignificantly, the 'essay' is a relatively recent form of writing; and the type of essay (in terms of its aims, length, structure, conventions and so forth) that philosophers write today is still more recent since it is linked both to the changes in publishing that made academic journals so important in the 18th Century, and to the more or less simultaneous invention of the modern University. It is common to identify philosophy as such with the production of essays (and books that are basically collections of essays) but this, I think, is a mistake.

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