I have the impression that the amount of work required on the part of anyone wishing to review this book(1) is already an indication of its nature. For this reason, I feel I must briefly justify the somewhat unusual form the following commentary has taken.

An old theory contrasts dialogue with writing. According to Plato, the latter is at most a sort of inventory to conserve things that have been arrived at by other means, and is of use when our memory begins to fail us. Indeed, “this is what is so terrible about writing (…) it is like creatures in a painting which seem so life-like, and yet if we ask them something, they remain quiet, closed in a solemn silence (…) they continue to repeat the same thing over and over again” (Phaedon). Thus, different readers seem to see different things in the same text (Protogoras). “Hypomnematic” knowledge is of most use to rhetoricians and sophists, who regard written texts as