A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations

In the same way. Socrates founded dialectic by writing. Those pre-Socratics had no systems and no dialectic and committed their insights to aphorisms which are figures without ground and without context. I am looking into the kinds of supposed context which have been attributed to the pre-Socratics, and I suspect that they are non-existent.
Letter to Thomas Langan, March 2, 1972, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 451
Year: 1972
Chapter: Aphorism
Compiled by William Kuhns
© 2026, The Estate of Marshall McLuhan