In a democratic society, where, in theory, every citizen contributes to the process of deliberation – or at least to the choice of representatives who will deliberate on her behalf – it is hard to argue against improving the public understanding of philosophy. That is why Aristotle, the philosopher who in the 4th century BCE defined the mechanics of logic – the reasoning processes we use not only in all academic disciplines but in politics and other walks of everyday life – broke with the traditional exclusivity of philosophical circles.
Aristotle rejected the elitism of Plato's Academy, where he had trained, and took to lecturing to the Athenian public every afternoon at the university he himself founded, the Lyceum. He also published short, accessible, inexpensive versions of his advanced treatises so that his ideas could circulate among the general population in the form of dialogues, or conversations between a philosopher and an ‘ordinary' person. He called these shorter works ‘exoteric', meaning ‘outward-facing', the opposite of ‘esoteric' or ‘inward-facing', and used them to disseminate his findings in many different fields of knowledge.
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