Philosophy is a continuing conversation. Its texture and structure, its methods and results, are closely similar to those of an evening's talk in a crowded room. Somebody who comes along afterwards to give you an account of what was said, whether he speaks as a direct ear-witness and participant or as a more or less ill-informed reporter, will present a picture that is distorted in one or more of a number of characteristic ways. It will oversimplify or overcomplicate, dramatise too much or too little; a monologue about a dialogue can never do full justice to its changes of key, pitch and tempo. Unless the history of philosophy is itself written as a conversation, it will not be likely to represent accurately the conversation that is philosophy.

Although philosophers from Socrates and Plato to Hegel and Wittgenstein have spoken of philosophy as dialectical, most philosophers, and nearly all non-philosophical readers and observers of philosophy, have failed to take seriously enough its dialectical, conversational character. Both in the conduct of philosophy itself, and in writing the history of philosophy, they have been too attached to political or even military analogies: to pictures of philosophers as forming parties or regiments, following leaders, firing at each other across gulfs, canyons or unbridgeable torrents, or shouting at each other across the floor of a House firmly held by stable coalitions, with only rare and abrupt changes of power.