First, Socrates posited that oral and written words play very different roles in an individual’s intellectual life; second, he regarded the new—and much less stringent—requirements that written language placed both on memory and on the internalization of knowledge as catastrophic; and third, he passionately advocated the unique role that oral language plays in the development of morality and virtue in a society. In each instance Socrates judged written words inferior to spoken words, for reasons that remain powerfully cautionary to this day.
