 The Liberal Temper makes the argument for the division between Plato and early Greek philosophy without a fully realised account of Havelock 's theory of Greek literacy , which he was still developing throughout this period . Rather than attempting once again to explain his distinction between 5th- and 4th @-@ century BC thought in terms of a dissection of the earlier school , Havelock turned , in his 1963 Preface to Plato , to 4th @-@ century BC philosophy itself . He was interested principally in Plato 's much debated rejection of poetry in the Republic , in which his fictionalised Socrates argues that poetic mimesis — the representation of life in art — is bad for the soul . Havelock 's claim was that the Republic can be used to understand the position of poetry in the " history of the Greek mind . " The book is divided into two parts , the first an exploration of oral culture ( and what Havelock thinks of as oral thought ) , and the second an argument for what Havelock calls " The Necessity of Platonism " ( the title of Part 2 ) : the intimate relationship between Platonic thought and the development of literacy . Instead of concentrating on the philosophical definitions of key terms , as he had in his book on Democritus , Havelock turned to the Greek language itself , arguing that the meaning of words changed after the full development of written literature to admit a self @-@ reflective subject ; even pronouns , he said , had different functions . The result was a universal shift in what the Greek mind could imagine : 
