Incorrigibly ‘old school’, the author spent many years lecturing in Higher and
Further Education trying, to borrow Socrates’ words, to light flames rather than fill vessels. In its own way this book is an attempt to come to terms with the bitter fruit of this failure, albeit in a way sweetened by the comedic aspects. The idea for this dialogue arose from the reading of the passages in “The Twilight of the Idols” in which Nietzsche mounts a number of his trade-mark idiosyncratic, ad hominem
arguments against Socrates. Initially intended as a means of reviewing and
explicating the latest Nietzschean scholarship in respect of the ‘shadows’ still cast
by Platonism, the fictionalised element of the dialogue evolved to form its own
analogic critique on the way philosophy is written and practiced, especially as
embodied here, by its all too human protagonists …