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OP About a year and a half ago,tsuwm mentioned maieutic mostly because it had
four vowels in a row, mentioning only very briefly its application to Socrates' teaching method.
"Søren Kierkegaard's method, dictated by his volatile and provocative temperament, resembles
that of a fiction writer: he engages in multiple impersonations, assuming various poses and
voices with an impartial vivacity. The method is, in one of his favorite words, maieutic, from
the Greek term for midwifery, like that of his beloved model Socrates, who in his questioning style
sought to elicit his auditors' ideas rather than impose his own."
I would be surprised to find that Socrates would have welcomed the term being applied to his
activities. So far as I know, there were no male "midwives" in his day, and I suspect the men of
his era would have resented the term being applied to them.
maieutic
adj.
Gr maieutikos < maia, midwife, orig., mother: see MAIA6 designating or of the Socratic method of helping a person to bring forth and become aware of latent ideas or memories
I finally found a site that stated Socrates did compare his method to that of a midwife:
http://www.shimer.edu/deans/response_jw.htm
Entire Thread Subject Posted By Posted A Word for Saturday wwh 10/19/02 08:08 PM Re: A Word for Saturday sjm 10/20/02 01:38 AM Re: A Word for Saturday Wordwind 10/20/02 11:54 AM Re: A Word for Saturday AnnaStrophic 10/20/02 12:41 PM Re: A Word for Saturday Wordwind 10/20/02 01:17 PM Re: A Word for Saturday Faldage 10/20/02 02:11 PM Re: A Word for Saturday tsuwm 10/20/02 02:45 PM Re: A Word for Saturday wwh 10/20/02 03:20 PM Re: A Word for Saturday wwh 10/20/02 03:34 PM Re: Sab Bath Wordwind 10/20/02 06:34 PM Re: Sab Bath of troy 10/20/02 06:47 PM Re: Sab Bath wofahulicodoc 10/20/02 11:19 PM Re: Sab Bath wwh 10/20/02 11:49 PM Re: Sab Bath wwh 10/20/02 11:56 PM Re: Sab Bath wwh 10/21/02 12:07 AM Re: Sabbath on Sunday Faldage 10/21/02 10:29 AM Re: Sab Bath sjm 10/20/02 06:50 PM Re: Sab Bath wwh 10/20/02 06:55 PM Re: Sab Bath Wordwind 10/20/02 09:32 PM Re: Sab Bath Faldage 10/20/02 09:42 PM Re: Sab Bath wwh 10/20/02 09:44 PM
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