In arguing for a basic heuristic split between Plato and the contemporaries of Democritus, Havelock was directly contradicting a very long tradition in philosophy that had painstakingly assembled innumerable connections between Plato and the pre-Socratics, to reinforce the position that Plato, as his own dialogues imply, was primarily informed by his teacher Socrates, and that Socrates in turn was a willing participant in a philosophical conversation already several hundred years old (again, with a seeming endorsement from Plato, who shows a young Socrates conversing with and learning from the pre-Socratics Parmenides and Zeno in his dialogue the "Parmenides"—a historical impossibility that might represent figuratively an intellectual rather than direct conversation). The book was intriguing to many philosophers but was poorly received among some classicists, with one reviewer calling Havelock's argument for basic difference between Plato and the pre-Socratics "a failure" and his analysis of Plato and Aristotle "distortion." Some problems have persisted in research of Greek literacy, and in the main, the interest in continuing the line of research has been sustained in scholarship since Havelock's death.