I regaled you last week with a couple of simple points from a book written in the early 200s of the Common Era, Diogenes Laertius' LIVES AND OPINIONS. The two points were these: Socrates was taught by a philosopher named Archelaus, who was a philosopher of nature in the manner of the Ionians. Separately, Socrates may have been a dramatist, who assisted in writing some of the works normally attributed to Euripides. If accepted as true (I don't think they are -- I have read a fair amount of discussion of Socrates without encountering ether of them) -- but IF accepted as true, do they change our understanding of the Athenian Enlightenment in any important way? Well ... perhaps. One of the bromides of Socrates scholarship is that before his time philosophy was about Nature writ large, the essence of the Cosmos. (Is everything water? is it air? fire? atoms? something else?). Through Socrates, philosophy came to encompass also a microcosm, the human soul and its virtues and vices. ...
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I've been reading Diogenes Laertius' LIVES AND OPINIONS. Considered as a piece of writing, it is a terrible job. It is just one thing after another. "Another story told about X is that Q1 happened to him. But according to some sources, it was Q2 that really happened. And according to others, Q1 really happened to Y instead. Yet another thing said about X is... Here are three brief poems attributed to X." Considered as a source on events of ancient times, that anti-stylistic formlessness is presumably its value. Laertius isn't inserting his own grand design into his account of lives and opinions of classical Greek philosophers. He is just passing along what he has heard. As to Socrates, [and yes that is the cliched image of Socrates above, the David painting], Laertius has heard at least two things that I hadn't encountered in any other source, and that seem intriguing: Socrates was taught by a philosopher named Archelaus, who was a philosopher of nature i...
Antithenes: if one is going to claim any familiarity with the Platonic moment in philosophy, with the moment that produced but did not yet contain Cynicism, Stoicism, and Pyrrhonism, one needs to know the name Antithenes. He was one of Socrates' followers, and so of very much the same philosophic milieu as Plato. But Antithenes went the other way on the issue of universals. He may even be said to be the founder of nominalism, saying thing like, "A horse I can see, but horsehood I cannot see." Too little in known about him. We do know, though, that the later Cynics claimed him as a spirit kindred to their own. They would tell a story of Diogenes of Sinope, as a young man, following Antithenes around to bask in his wisdom. This tale seems unlikely. It was invented to give the Cynics a sort of apostolic succession from Socrates, who by Diogenes' day was seen as the gold standard of philosophical greatness by a number of distinct factions. Socrates to Antithene...
In the business world at present, the initials "LLM" mean "large language model". It also means one particular avenue of movement in the development of artificial intelligence. Algorithms scour the web, scooping up huge blocks of text in the meantime (hence the initials), and output/offer what seems like the answer to a question that a well informed human would give. Or that is the idea. Sometimes it fails in fascinating ways. For example, an LLM model told me that Plato, in the dialogue PHAEDO, tells a story of how Socrates held a young man's head under water. This is a story that has already been making the rounds of the internet, pre-LLM. It shows up in self-help books. Socrates lets go of the young fellow (Simmias, on some accounts) in time for him to surface, breathe, and survive. Then Socrates delivers the punchline, "when you desire success as much as you just desired air, you will be a success." The story is a recent invention, and is jus...
At Quora, someone recently asked me who was the greater influence upon Plato: Socrates or Parmenides? It is a fascinating question, to which I could only answer with some further related questions, a dash of context, and a joke. I enjoyed it all so much, though, that I will reproduce it here. To begin with, there is no good metric of “influence.” You can’t measure influence like inches or Celsius degrees and say X is exercising more of this unidimensional stuff than Y is. Who influenced John Dewey more: Charles Darwin [pictured] or William James? Except that in the Dewey case we have much more information. We know what Darwin’s views on a wide range of subjects were, and what James’ were, and we can work to understand how Dewey’s thought was formed by each. We don’t depend on Dewey to tell us what James said or thought! In the Plato analog, though, we do largely depend on Plato to tell us what Socrates said or thought. There are other sources who help at the edges — Ar...
Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave. First, Plato is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability. I only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable a...
One of Plato's dialogs has Socrates arguing moral and related issues with Protagoras, portrayed here as the leader of the Sophists. Although as usual Socrates is the vehicle for Plato's presentation of what are almost certainly Plato's own views, Protagoras has some really striking lines. I like to think of at least one of these lines as a bit of the historical Protagoras, embedded here like the DNA of a dinosaur within a mosquito within amber. "The Athenians are right to accept advice from anyone, since it is incumbent on everyone to share in that sort of excellence, or else there can be no city at all." That speaks to the greatness of Periclean Athens, when it attracted the best minds from all around the Hellenic world, an extensive world stretching from the coast of Asia Minor to Sicily. Athens would, in that sense "accept advice from anyone. A closed city in in danger of becoming "no city at all." That brief passage speaks to the idea of an Ope...
Philebus is one of Plato's Socratic dialogues. The title character barely participates. Socrates duels, rather, with Protarchus. And the central theme of the (wide ranging) discussion is hedonism. To what extent is the good life a life defined by successful pleasure seeking? The key passage runs thus: Socrates: Then would you think you needed anything else besides, if you possessed this one blessing [pleasure] in completeness? Protarchus: Certainly not. Socrates: Consider what you are saying. You would not need to be wise and intelligent and reasonable, nor anything like this? Would you not even care to keep your sight? Protarchus: Why should I? I suppose I should have all I want, if I was pleased. Socrates: Well ... inasmuch as you would not possess intelligence and memory and knowledge and true opinion, you would, in the first place, necessarily be without the knowledge whether you were pleased or not. For you would be devoid of any kind of wisdom. You admit this...
Who was Socrates' teacher? Is there someone (historical) who bears the same relationship to him that he bears to Plato and Plato bears to Aristotle, so that we can extend the line of apostolic succession one link further back? The SYMPOSIUM, Socrates said that he was taught about Love (and, it seems, about other conceptions basic to his philosophy) by a woman named Diotima. There is room for debate about how historical this bit was. Plato may have invented her for expository purposes. One consideration though is the placename associated with her. She is called “Diotima of Mantinea,” and Mantinea was a city in the Peloponnese affiliated with Sparta. Plato, I think, would not have invented this detail. In the climate after the execution of Socrates, he would not have encouraged the notion that “perhaps he had the hemlock coming because he was consorting with the enemy.” So … maybe she is historical and the right answer to our question. (The above is the image assigned to he...
This was my answer to the question whether Plato's account of Socrates can be relied upon: Plato’s account [or accounts] of Socrates has [have] to be considered in connection with other evidence, especially in my view the comedy THE CLOUDS, written by Aristophanes during Socrates’ lifetime. That is the TL;DR answer. For more, bear with me. Aristophanes portrays Socrates as a sophist, and in fact as the leader of the sophists. And he portrays sophism in general as what we might call a cult, the purpose of which is to make bad arguments seem good, and good arguments seem bad. Now this is odd on its face. Plato after all portrays Socrates as an anti-sophist. In PROTAGORAS especially, and even in the early going of THE REPUBLIC (the exchange with Thrasymachus), the Platonic Socrates devotes himself largely to showing the sophists — or to showing impressionable youngsters — the errors and arrogance of sophism. And Plato’s Socrates seems to object to s...
Okay, that headline may not be exactly "click bait." I'm glad you're with me anyway. I believe I've mentioned in this blog at some point a book by a Plato scholar, Racanha Ramtekar, PLATO'S MORAL PSYCHOLOGY. The book drew a review from Nicholas Smith, and that review drew in turn a riposte from Ramtekar. I'll quote just a bit of the latter here. By way of background: it is a very common observation that the earlier dialogs of Plato take a very different point of view of morality and psychology than do later ones. One common contention is that Plato started off as a faithful follower of the historical Socrates, but then developed in different directions. This is sometimes called the "developmentalist" view of Plato, as opposed to he "unitarian" theory which makes the case that Plato was really consistent without. Ramtekar is neither a developmentalist nor a unitarian. She sees it as a false dichotomy. Her reviewer, Smit...
The Socrates of the early and presumably more historical Platonic documents is sometimes portrayed as naive. The thinking is this: Socrates identified knowledge with virtue, and thus inferred that people only do wrong things because they are insufficiently well informed. With that naive view of human nature Plato also began, so the early dialogs are faithful to it. But as Plato grew older and wiser, he modified this view and allowed for untamed passions in the human soul that cause trouble not attributable to ignorance. [See the angry fellow portrayed above.] And the "Socrates" who continued to serve as Plato's mouthpiece represented this chastened view. But the story is not faithful to the texts. Socrates, even the Socrates portrayed in the dialogues often used to tell this story, was never that naive. A discussion: https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/appetite-anger-harmonized-knowledge-talking-rachana-kamtekar/ That's the review, in the Los Ange...
In its own way this is the most puzzling of Plato's many dialogs. The PARMENIDES establishes that Plato was fully aware of the standard arguments against the "Theory of the Forms." He puts them into the mouth of the elder Parmenides who is supposed to have met a young Socrates. What is supposed to be the take-away? I would guess that it is that the views expressed at the start of this dialog are those of the YOUNG Socrates, and that we're supposed to contrast this decisively refutable stuff with some more sophisticated version of the theory of the Forms we could attribute to the older man, and to Plato himself. But I don't understand of what the implied and later-acquired sophistication consists.
Oxford University Press has a book out entitled Plato's Moral Psychology , written by Rachana Kamtekar, who is affiliated with Cornell University. The book came out in 2017 but seems still to be kicking up excitement in the relevant quarters of academe. It dd succeed in making a new splash out of its very old subject matter. She identifies a common understanding, among students of Plato, that there was a shift in Plato's views on moral psychology between the earlier dialogues and th e Republic . The early dialogs take an intellectualist view of motivation, so that bad actions are the consequence of error or ignorance, and virtue is teachable. But by the time he wrote the Republic (says the standard view) Plato had abandoned that intellectualism. Kamtekar believes this account mistaken. She holds instead, that for Socrates, at least as Plato retrospectively understood his views, that the good is the natural object of desire. This is not as simple as claim is that virtue ...
I recently discussed here the Peircean idea of 'abduction.' But I did so in a frankly polemical context, criticizing shoddy work by another writer who got the idea wrong or, rather, who did not get it at all but who failed to realize his loss. Leaving such caviling aside, let me make an observation about the need for the idea. . The idea arose because Peirce considered standard accounts of logic in his own day to be viciously circular. They relied on induction on the one hand and deduction on the other. Deduction has to give us the premises that make induction possible, and induction has to give us the premises that make deduction possible. Take the famous syllogism about Socrates. All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. The obvious problem here is that unless I know that Socrates is mortal, I don't know that all men are mortal. If exceptions are possible, then Socrates could be one of them. If I'm presuming that exceptions are not ...
Stefan Molyneux has gone all Trumpet on us. I've written about Molyneux before, most recently a two-post discussion early this year, keyed to his now-decade-old book, UNIVERSALLY PREFERRED BEHAVIOR (2007) in which he claimed to have figured out what are the rules of behavior all rational beings should follow, and to have inferred from them that the right social system is anarcho-capitalism. That book wasn't a great one, frankly, and Molyneux at his best is a pale shadow of Murray Rothbard as an anarcho-cap figure. Still, he was on the good guy's side, as I keep score anyway. Molyneux, though, has progressively defected. He is now entirely in the MAGA camp. The nation-state may never be legitimate, but it can be legitimate enough! at least if Donald Trump is its CEO. Or ... something. The news about Molyneux is that he is out with another book, THE ART OF THE ARGUMENT (2017). The is some copy from the amazon page: "'T he Art of the Argument' shoc...
Henry brought up a good point in the comment section of a post a couple of weeks ago. What do we know about the historical Socrates? Should he even be included on "greatest philosophers" lists independent of Plato? As I said in a responsive comment at the time, we know there WAS a historical Socrates, that he wasn't simply a figment of Plato's imagination serving as mouthpiece. The other sources include: Xenophon, another of Socrates' students, who wrote his own account of Socrates' trial and condemnation; Aristophanes, the playwright who wrote a comedy with Socrates as its comic butt; and Aristotle, who referenced Socrates in ways that suggest that he was writing for an audience that still remembered the guy. From all of this, scholars have tried to tease out what was S., what was merely the mouthpiece for P. of the same name. The case of the Aristophanes/Socrates/Plato triangle fascinates me. If one reads THE CLOUDS, one gets a vivid picture of wh...