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who wrote imitations of those endless Socratic conversations,
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Aristotle wrote disciplined and thematic treatises
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on virtually every topic,
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from biology to ethics to metaphysics
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to literary criticism and politics.
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One can assume safely that Aristotle would have received tenure
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in any number of departments at Yale,
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whereas Socrates could not have applied to
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have been a teaching assistant.
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These differences conceal others.
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For Plato, it would seem, the study of politics was always
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bound up with deeply philosophical and speculative questions,