Philosophy, Dialogue, Monologue

One respect in which Whitehead's observation--that Philosophy has been a "series of footnotes to Plato"--is incorrect is that with a few minor exceptions, those 'footnotes' have been monological, whereas not only is the original dialogical, but the initial one reports actual events.  Now, in much of that subsequent tradition, the monologue is at least implicitly recognized to be a part of an ongoing exchange with peers, and, hence, part of a dialogue.  However, others more stridently insist that the monological 'argument' is the essential self-suficient philosophical expression, thereby tellingly implying that Socrates' courage in the face of death is extrinsic to what they consider to be 'Philosophy'.  So, perhaps the closest contemporary approximation to the Socratic/Platonic dialogue is the sometimes only ceremonial dissertation defense.  Still, the more egregious divergence from that exemplar is Heidegger's thesis that Socrates begins a 'history of the forgetting of Being', a thesis which attempts to codify the abandonment of Philosophy as a mode of social communication, a divergence that becomes two-fold with his cowardly refusal after 1945 to publicly defend his earlier writings.