An excerpt:
And the form of this performance, Wilshire continues, is court-room litigation, a form that “fits no historical model of legitimate philosophical dialectic” — indeed, it is antagonistic and antithetical to it, for it is about winning the debate, a rhetorical theatrics for the sake of making a good point, and closing down your “opponent”… In other words, the very opposite of what Socrates, for example, was engaged in: a sincere inquiry into truth, goodness and, finally (perhaps ultimately), beauty. “If all this is true … then there has been”, writes Wilshire, “a return of what Plato and Socrates stigmatized as eristic, a mere disputation, something unworthy of a philosopher”, for it trumps pure theoria — a glimpse of the sacred structure of Being as such — in favor of mere sound opinion, that is, mere verbal soundness, integrity of the discursive, rhetorical wit. A performance, theatrics for its own sake. Truth is long; truth is arduous; truth is dialectical: the movement of an idea ’round the great expanse of being, out towards beings back towards Being. Back and forth; energetic, erotic, poesis.