"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: