Socrates on the periphery: ways of unravelling the puzzles of life.
Since Socrates commences most of his inquiries not at the center but on the periphery, in the motley variety of life endlessly interwoven within itself, an exceptional degree of art is needed to unravel not only itself but also the abstract of life’s complications and those of the Sophists as well. The art we are describing here is, of course, the rather well known Socratic art of asking questions or, to recall the necessity of dialogue for Platonic philosophy, the art of conversing. This is why Socrates so frequently and with such profound irony points out to the Sophists that they do indeed know how to speak but do not know how to converse.
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