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Hume wrote some of his works in the style of a Dialogue following Platos lead; has any-one since? Or is it all prose?

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    Any number of people have written philosophical dialogues, the real question is who has paid attention?
    – Chris Sunami
    Sep 30, 2014 at 20:34
  • @sunami: sure; it appears as a moribund literary tradition; but for all one knows there may be some gems out there; GB Shaw explicitly dramatised Nietzsche in Man & Superman.
    – Mozibur Ullah
    Sep 30, 2014 at 21:34
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    You may be interested in Alain Badiou's "hypertranslation" of the Republic (which introduces additional characters among other things...)
    – Joseph Weissman ♦
    Sep 30, 2014 at 23:55
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    Bishop Berkeley and St. Anselm both wrote noted philosophical dialogues, but both were prior to Hume. @MoziburUllah My prior comment, for what it's worth, was more rueful than mocking. I myself wrote a book of philosophy in dialog form --but it vanished silently without a trace.
    – Chris Sunami
    Oct 1, 2014 at 0:40
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    The teachings of the Hindu saint Ramakrishna (1836-1886) are recorded in "The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna" in a similar manner by his disciple who went by the name 'M'.
    – Swami Vishwananda
    Oct 1, 2014 at 11:21

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See John Perry's A Dialogue on Personal Identity and his Dialogue on Good, Evil and the Existence of God. Furthermore some of David Lewis's smaller pieces (written together with Stephanie Lewis) are dialogues: 'Holes' and a review of Casati and Varzi's Holes and Other Superficialities

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Here are a few examples of books using the dialogue form:

  • Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960's by Owen Barfield (1963) is written in the form of a fictional dialogue.
  • Corydon by André Gide (1911) contains four Socratic dialogues on homosexuality.
  • Peter Kreeft published several books that are fictional dialogues between Socrates and a more recent philosopher, e.g. Socrates Meets Hume, Socrates Meets Kant, Socrates Meets Machiavelli.
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This seems to have survived more in logic and foundations than philosophy broadly.

Lakatos Proofs and Refutations on the philosophy of science as applied to mathematics is not so out-of-date. Neither are various books like Surreal Numbers by Knuth, or some of Raymond Smulliyan. Large parts of Douglas Hoffstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach are in dialog form.

I think the form is coming to be restricted to popularizations or restatements of work that is kind of impenetrable otherwise.

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  • I would have guessed along the same lines; I'd add in Lewis Carolls Alice in Wonderland for its playful use of language and logic - Deleuze I think wrote an essay on it.
    – Mozibur Ullah
    Oct 2, 2014 at 18:15
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Matthew Stewart did a little bit in his book: The Truth About Everything: An Irreverent History of Philosophy.

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