Socratize

And so long as the Spanish Cortes is not an assembly of Adonises, Antinouses, boys, and other similar angels; so long as one goes there to legislate and not to socratize or wander through imaginary hemispheres, we believe that the government should not be deterred by those obstacles.

...he gets to his feet, bestows further kisses upon his little partner, exposes to her view a great ass of very evil aspect and very unclean, and he orders her to give it a throrough shaking, to socratize it; ...

“I kiss your Priapus,” Poittevin wrote frequently to Flaubert. “Adieu, dear Pederast,” “Adieu, old buddy, I kiss you and socratize you,” were standard greetings in Poittevin's missives to his friend in Croisset.

It is, of course, any editor's obligation to "socratize" these matters, to make interpretations as provisional hypotheses for readers to test through their own questioning and analysis.

Aristophanes made fun of a rather different sort of imitator a year later in the Birds (produced in 422 BCE), coining the comic verb “socratize” to describe odd people in Athens who “wear long hair, go hungry and wild, socratize—and carry sticks!