Philosophical Traditions Notes PDF

LA Philosophical Traditions Lecture 1: Introduction to Course Reading Plato: Philosophy as Dialogue Superlative prose writer Why? Plato thought writing was inferior to philosophical conversation. Suggests how we ought to carry out discussions (?) (Allows the person to interrogate th...

LA Philosophical Traditions Lecture 1: Introduction to Course Reading Plato: Philosophy as Dialogue Superlative prose writer Why? Plato thought writing was inferior to philosophical conversation. Suggests how we ought to carry out discussions (?) (Allows the person to interrogate the answer in different ways, accommodating a myriad of different and opposing views. ‘Aporia’) Reading Plato in translation — difficulties? ‘Logos’ has multiple meanings, i.e. ‘word’, ‘proportion’, ‘law’, ‘rationality’, ‘argument’. Translation demands an element of choice, so sometimes the original text does not always match the translated text exactly Basic Structure Introduction (write LAST. Start with a statement of the conclusion. DO NOT include biographical information/general information. ‘In this essay, I will argue that…’ etc.) 50-100 words Outline of source material. As concise as possible. No waffling. Be selective. 200 ish Your view about that source material and why you hold it (a lot of words). Use opinions of other philosophers to back up the argument. What someone who disagreed with you might say 50 words Why they would be wrong (rest of the words here) Conclusion (email to ask about this? Video said not to write a conclusion because should be obvious from previous paragraphs) Should be VERY brief. 2 sentences. Shorter than introduction. CLARITY is most important. Forget about literary flare and style before you have secured clarity. Be clear and precise. Be concise. Can number sections, i.e. introduction = 1, outline = 2, etc. Then refer back to sections. (Increase clarity) Want to give somebody motivation to believe you are right, reasons to believe your argument. A paragraph should have one idea in it. New idea = new paragraph. Use Bank of Assessed Work to read other essays. General Tips: 1. Drafts — write at least 2. The first draft doesn’t have a word limit, just write down all the ideas and get everything on the page. Then, whittle it down, making it more clear and precise. 2. Feedback — Always come and discuss your plan in an office hour 3. Start with the Required Reading 4. Don’t end there! Do some research. (Upload as a pdf — write on google docs?) 1 1st Year Essays don’t matter, grade wise. Just have to pass (40%) (Attend workshops by CAL academic writing hub) Start writing and planning immediately after getting the questions. This means you can write as many drafts as possible. How many sources? No fixed number — enough to make your argument stick! 20 references would be too many. 2 wouldn’t be enough. 5-10 would be perfect. Do you have to persuade us you’re right? No! Just write as though that’s what you’re trying to do. Do I need to devise a completely original theory? No! Originality comes in many forms. But make sure you add references for any quotes or paraphrases used. Paraphrasing is usually better than quoting as it shows and demands a higher level of understanding. Harvard referencing is preferred. Bibliography doesn’t count towards word count. In text citations do count. To do for next weeks lecture/seminar: Answer discussion questions in blue book. Write answers. Read essays from Bank of Assessed Work. Add greek keyboard to iPad. Read ‘the apology’ at perseus.tufts.edu Lecture 2: Plato’s Intellectual Background Plato gave us some debates and techniques that we still use today Definition of knowledge Problem of universals Clarity and the importance of definitions He was heavily influenced by (and a main source of information about) Socrates, but also Heraclitus and Parmenides. Heraclitus and Parmenides are presocratic philosophers. Presocratic philosophers focus on ideas about the world and existence, whereas after philosophy tended towards ideas about the ‘good life’. Heraclitus No full books survive, only fragments. Paradox of the River: ‘you can’t step in the same river twice’— this is an echo of what Heraclitus said. Seems right that the river has changed when you return. The water is all different. Is there really anything like a paradox here? 2  What Heraclitus actually said about the river: ‘On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow’. i.e. you can step into the same river twice, but it has different water. In at least some cases, the most fundamental thing we can say about something is not what its made of, but what it does. Heraclitus identifies the logos as determining what something is, not what it is made of. Some things get to be what they are only by continuously changing. The unchanging river is more changing than unchanging. Changelessness requires change (for some things, like a river). What does Plato take from Heraclitus? ‘Everything is in flux’ as a reason for thinking nothing is stable enough to be an object of knowledge. This was probably not the right moral for him to have drawn. Parmenides Everything is a single, changeless sphere. (This theory is written as a poem.) Parmenides commitment to reason: The world doesn’t seem to be an unchanging, single, perfect sphere. To conclude that takes something beyond empirical observation. But how can reason get us to such a startling conclusion? Being (central topic of metaphysics. Abstract talk about what is) : He says we can talk of what is and must be, or of what isn’t and can’t be. Parmenides’ Argument 1. Whatever exists cannot fail to exist 2. We cannot think about non-being 3. Being can’t come from non-being 4. Being can’t be replaced by non-being 5. So being can’t come into existence or go out of existence (eternal and changeless). Change? If nothing can come to be or cease to be, then no change is possible. Plurality? No. Between any two bits if being there would be non-being, and non-being doesn’t exist (but non-being of the thing doesn’t exist but something else does exist, so there isn’t non-being in the middle??) Socrates Plato’s teacher 3  Wrote nothing Evidence from Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes Famously tried and convicted for impiety, and ‘corrupting the youth of Athens’. Voted ‘guilty’ by a narrow margin. Then got death penalty by a much larger margin Lecture 3: Plato’s Intellectual Background, and The Theory of Forms Introductory Remarks After last week’s look at some of the background against which Plato formulated the metaphysical underpinnings of some of his more famous ideas, it’s now time to look at that metaphysical view itself. We saw, you will remember, that the lesson Plato took from Heraclitus (even if by getting Heraclitus second-hand) was that the world around us, the empirical world of the senses, is in flux and so is not the sort of thing of which we can gain stable, reliable knowledge. If everything is in continuous change, the thought goes, then as soon as you make any assertion about it, about its nature, it will have changed and moved on, and your claim will be out of date. Nevertheless, Plato was confident that knowledge of the world was possible. The implication of this is that there must be some feature of the world that is not in constant flux, and that as a result is a suitable object for our efforts to know about it. From Parmenides, Plato gets the inspiration for such a feature of the world, and the conviction that it must in the end be changeless and eternal. Unlike Parmenides, Plato doesn’t think the *whole* of the world is like this: he retains the idea that the world of our sense experience, though not eternal and unchanging, nevertheless exists. For the eternal and knowable aspect of the world, Plato has to look not to the world of our senses and our empirical observation, but to the abstract world of the Forms. The Theory of Forms in Plato’s Philosophy The Socratic search for definitions of the nature of beauty, the nature of piety, the nature of courage, and so on, is in essence a search for knowledge of the Forms of beauty, piety, and the other things. What Socrates (Plato) wants to know is not some nice example of a pious action, or some feature of pious actions that is shared by impious actions, but what piety is in itself. This notion of a pure, unmixed and fixed property in which various things can share is roughly our first glimpse of the Parmenidean half of Plato’s metaphysics. The things we can know about - those features that make the changing world what it is from moment to moment – are themselves eternal and unchanging. 4 Plato uses the Forms in his account of the possibility of knowledge, and its distinction from belief and opinion; he uses the Forms in his argument for the immortality of the soul, as we will see next week; and he uses the Forms in his explanation of how to develop appropriate leaders for the ideal state in the Republic. In one way or another, the Forms underlie much of Plato’s philosophy. It is perhaps odd, then, that he never gives us a straight explanation of what the Forms are, or even what Forms there are. Both things emerge gradually from the way that Plato employs the notions in his discussions. There seem to be courage and beauty and justice, but also, for example, largeness. There do not seem to be ‘negative’ Forms, like badness, impiety and so on. The suggestion seems to be that imperfect things get to be partly bad because of the imperfect or incomplete way in which they participate in the positive Forms. ‘Participation’ is here a semi-technical term, used for the way that objects in the sensible world are related to the unchanging Forms. They are said to ‘participate in’ the Forms. What this relation amounts to is never clearly spelt out, but for our purposes a broadly intuitive sense of it will do. You can begin to think of it as the way in which an object gets to be the way it is, and of degrees of participation as something like the way one thing gets to be more – say – pious than another. If you’re familiar with the later metaphysics literature, the relation is somewhat like the instantiation relation in which particulars stand to (transcendent) universals. Don’t worry if that doesn’t make things easier now! Thinking about Platonic Forms is a perfectly good way in to thinking about the later discussion of universals. Illustrating the Forms in the Republic: Sun, Divided Line, and Cave In your basic seminar reading for this week you have perhaps the most famous illustration by Plato of the ways in which the Forms relate to knowledge and opinion, to appearance and reality. We begin with the analogy of the Sun, in which the sun as source of light and that which makes possible vision is presented as analogous to the Good, which makes possible understanding and is the source of reality and truth. Plato here doesn’t mean individual good actions to be taken as the source of truth; we are again talking about the Form of the Good. What precisely this might be is again something that is left to emerge from the discussion rather than being stated. A good first pass is to think of it as the thing which allows other things to be good – that feature which all good things share. This isn’t quite satisfactory, as we’ll see shortly with a look at ‘Diotima’s ladder’: ‘good things’ is also being taken by Plato in a somewhat wider sense than you might imagine. The Divided Line is an image Plato uses to show the relations between the two ‘orders of reality’ that the analogy of the Sun suggests. On the one hand we have the objects of our attention, down one side of the line, and down the other we have the type or state of belief or knowledge associated with those various kinds of objects of attention. At one end we have the uncertain state of illusion, a state of belief in which everything is dark and mistaken. Corresponding to this in the order of objects of attention we have ‘shadows and images’. Only one step up from there we find physical things, which are the source or object of opinion – another level of belief in which some of the darkness has been removed and things appear clearer. But still we haven’t reached knowledge, because physical things, as we’ve seen, are constantly shifting and so cannot really be known. 5 Next up we enter the realm of the forms, and begin in the third section of the line with the Forms as the object of mathematical reasoning. Mathematicians do not consider any physical triangle, for example, but an ideal triangle, or the Form of triangle. Physical objects can nevertheless be used as illustrations of the type of reasoning involved at this stage of the line. This section is also presumably meant to include forms of justice and piety and so on, as well as the geometric Forms. The appeal to mathematical reasoning might seem obscure in those cases, but may be evidence of the Platonic, and perhaps Pythagorean, view that proper ordered practical reasoning about the world is best conceived of as mathematical in a wider sense. We won’t explore the Pythagorean connections in Plato on this course. This section of the line shows the Forms as considered uncritically and unreflectively. Mathematicians are engaged in deductive reasoning about reality and not in reflecting on its ultimate nature. Finally we come to the top part of the line, which is clearly intended by Plato to be the most important. Here we find the Forms as appreciated by pure thought, or intelligence, or dialectic (a name Plato uses for philosophical reflection – don’t be misled by any more modern associations for that term). With this division in place we come to the simile of the cave. The philosopher is portrayed as someone who has escaped from darkness into light and seen truth rather than mere shadow and illusion. That is, so to speak, someone that has made their way along the Divided Line. Crucially, when the philosopher has done this, their duty is to go back into the cave, to face the ridicule of an uncomprehending public, to impart the lessons learnt in contemplation of the Forms. This is evidence of Plato’s focus on the production of the best society as a whole and not on the comfort or self-development or satisfaction of any particular individual. The layout of the cave is somewhat unusual. There are lifelong prisoners deep in the cave, chained so they can only look ahead at a wall of the cave. Behind and above them is a fire, near the mouth of the cave. Between the fire and the prisoners is a wall or screen, behind which people walk along a road carrying various objects, including figures of animals made of wood and stone! The prisoners see nothing of all this except the shadows cast on the wall in front of them. They assume, naturally enough, that what they can see are the real things. One prisoner is released, and begins the ascent to the world outside the cave. The released prisoner would not believe his captors when they told him that he now saw things that were more real than the shadows he was used to, because he would be dazzled by the bright light of the fire and confused by the jumble of colours and new sounds. Making his way further up he would find the ascent into sunlight painful. He would resort to looking at reflections in water by moonlight and other ways of saving his delicate eyes. The very last thing he would come to be able to do would be to look at the sun. If made to return to the cave, he would, despite his new knowledge of the truth of the situation of the prisoners, be blinded by the darkness to which he was now unaccustomed, and would function poorly in relation to the other prisoners at tasks of identifying and talking about the shadows on the wall. The prisoners would think him turned mad by his experiences and would resist any effort to remove them from their shackles and the cave. 6 Plato explicitly calls on us to make the connections between this simile of the cave and the similes of the sun and the divided line that have gone before. In view of those previous similes we can start to draw the connections between the situation of the prisoners and the situation in which the common run of humanity finds itself. We can almost hear in Plato’s description of the treatment of the freed prisoner on his return the frustration of a philosopher trying to explain the truth to a baffled and frightened public! Nevertheless, Plato sees it as the prisoner’s duty to return to the cave; he sees it as the philosopher’s duty not to sit in seclusion and quiet contemplation, but to return to the world and benefit society with the knowledge he or she has gained. We will see in a couple of weeks how this plays out in the notion of Philosopher Kings in the Republic. For now it becomes clearer how this simile of the cave has a place in a section of the book explicitly devoted to the education of the philosopher. Question: Do you find Plato’s simile of the Cave compelling? Do you see the parallels he suggests with the position of the philosopher in our world? Knowing the Forms: Diotima’s Ladder Having said the philosopher’s duty is to acquire knowledge – that is, knowledge of the Forms – and then to put this knowledge to good use for the betterment of society, Plato owes us an account of how we might come to know such abstract things. How, in more concrete terms, might we escape from the cave? In another very famous passage, this time in the Symposium, Socrates recounts a story of the priestess Diotima, in which she tells of the stages along the way to acquiring knowledge of the Form of Beauty, as follows. First, the lover of beauty will desire and appreciate beautiful things themselves – beautiful bodies. Then they will acquire a sense of all beautiful bodies, seeing that what made the first objects of their desire beautiful is shared by these others. They will come to see that the beauty of souls is greater than the beauty of bodies. Then the lover will see and appreciate the patterns underlying all the beauty they’ve seen so far. We have now reached the beginnings of abstraction, and so are in the realm of knowledge. Recall the third section of the Divided Line, which contains mathematical knowledge. This stage will presumably contain some laws and patterns that hold between the instances of beauty. But we have a way to go before we reach the pinnacle of abstraction, and so the eternal source of understanding. From the mathematical patterns, and the institutions that govern the existence and behaviour of the many and various beautiful things, we begin to see the beauty of knowledge itself. From there we come to appreciate the Form of beauty, and from there to the Form of the Good. So by a repeated application of a kind of abstraction, we get further from empirical investigation and the changing sensible world and closer to the eternal unchanging Realm of the Forms. It seems quite striking, given that what he’s trying to outline here is so unfamiliar and peculiar, that Plato is only asking us to make one more iteration of a kind of step we’re already perfectly familiar 7 with, namely, moving our focus one step in the direction of generality. By increasing abstraction we can get, with practice, from contemplating shifting objects in the ever-changing material world, to contemplating the Forms in their changeless eternity. Question: Do you find this account philosophically plausible? Metaphorically useful? Question: Do you, at this stage, find the idea of Forms itself necessary? Plausible? Convincing? Reading List Texts by Plato (any edition, see below for a good online collection): Republic Meno Phaedo Symposium Apology Crito Euthyphro Theaetetus Supplementary material This is a representative sample, but the literature is endless. Browse, dig, root around in bibliographies, and you’ll soon get a feel for the big themes and the big names. Here again is that website I mentioned where Peter Adamson archives his podcast The History of Philosophy, Without Any Gaps: http://www.historyofphilosophy.net/classical I haven’t listened to them all since Aristotle, but I was quite hooked for a while. Well worth a listen. Then of course there is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For example these entries (but browse the A-Z contents, follow links at the bottom of articles to related materials, and use the search function as well). http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-metaphysics/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/ Also browse JSTOR.org – an online journal archive –by doing an ‘advanced search’ with topics, keywords or authors in your search terms. You can narrow the search to philosophy – and you might like to include classics whilst we’re doing ancient philosophy – using the check boxes under the main search box. And here are some books. In the edited collections (marked ‘ed.’) you should browse the collected papers for some interesting finds. Also look in the library catalogue using authors and book titles as keywords. You will find a lot is available that I haven’t listed, some of them in online versions. 8 Browse and explore. If you want to check whether something that you’ve found is worth spending an afternoon on, send me an email. Annas, Julia. 1981. An Introduction to Plato’s Republic. Oxford: Clarendon. Annas, Julia. 2003. Plato. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP. Annas, Julia. 2000. Ancient Philosophy. A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: OUP. Day, Jane M. ed. 1994. Plato’s Meno in Focus. London: Routledge. Fine, Gail. 1993. On Ideas: Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato’s Theory of Forms. Oxford: Clarendon. Fine, Gail. 2003. Plato on Knowledge and Forms: Selected Essays. Oxford: Clarendon. Fine, Gail. 2008. The Oxford Handbook of Plato. Oxford: OUP. Kenny, Anthony. 2012. A New History of Western Philosophy. Oxford: OUP. Kraut, Richard. ed. 1992. The Cambridge Companion to Plato. Cambridge: CUP. Melling, David. 1987. Understanding Plato. Oxford: OUP. Nehamas, Alexander. 1999. Virtues of Authenticity: essays on Plato and Socrates. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Santas, Gerasimos. ed. 2006. The Blackwell Guide to Plato’s Republic. Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, C.C.W. ed. 2003. From the Beginning to Plato. Routledge History of Philosophy Volume 1. London: Routledge. Vlastos, Gregory. 1991. Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher. Cambridge: CUP. White, Nicholas. 1976. Plato on Knowledge and Reality. Indianapolis: Hackett. Seminar Reading Seminars are an excellent place to deepen your knowledge of the material, and the best forum we have for developing the essential philosophical skill of spoken discussion. That’s not something you can learn by yourself. Also, everyone benefits from the variety of views on offer if everyone turns up. Everyone will have read the main text, but each of you should also make every effort to read something else as well. This can really be anything you like. An encyclopaedia article, a paper you find in a journal, a book from the library, a chapter from a history of philosophy, something out of a guide book to Plato’sphilosophy, or a guide to a particular book that we’re looking at. See the reading list for some suggestions, but also browse the library, or the library catalogue online, search the journal archive at JSTOR.org, and just read anything that looks fascinating. Then come to the seminarand tell everyone about it! The things other people will read will be unpredictable, so there’s something to be gained by everyone. If you already think you know it all, and were considering not going to the seminars for that reason, think how great it will be for everyone else if you come along! If you think you know enough to write a decent essay and so don’t need to go to the seminars, imagine how great the essay could be if you come along! Also, I think there’s a curse that the administrators know the words to that will mean you get 4% less in every assessment than you would otherwise get, and they speak those words when you miss two or three seminars. Imagine how annoying it will be when you average 68% in the third year and you could have got a first. So, with that rousing speech to boost morale, this week’s Seminar Reading is from that towering giant amongst philosophy books, the Republic: Plato, Republic (502-521). These are the marginal numbers (known as ‘Stephanus numbers’ from their origins in an edition of Plato from the 16th Century: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanus_pagination). 9 In the Penguin Classics edition this is Part 7 (book 6) §5 p.265 to the end of part 7 (part way through book 7) on p.286. Or go to this online edition at the Perseus Digital Library, and start at this page: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0168%3Abook%3D6% 3Apage%3D502 It’s really not worth using any other online version, since this one has the Stephanus numbers. Start with the paragraph that begins ‘This difficulty disposed of’ and read until you reach “Plat. Rep. 7.521” as indicated by the box just above and at the right hand side of the main text. This resource also has Plato’s Meno, Symposium, Theaetetus and others Lecture 4: Plato on Learning and the Immortality of the Soul Notes provided: Introductory Remarks Last week we saw how Plato thought that knowledge of the Forms was possible. We ended on the image of ‘Diotima’s Ladder’, an outline of a method, of sorts, of attaining to knowledge of the Form of Beauty. It seemed to some of you, I think – and understandably so! – that this method left something to be desired in terms of practical guidance. OK, so we proceed by attending to ever more abstract and general levels, but how are we to make the last step that Diotima – that is, Socrates, which is to say Plato – advocates? In the dialogue called the Meno, Plato gives us his theory of learning, which helps somewhat to explain this final step. The reason why we can make the move to knowledge of the Form of Beauty so comparatively straightforwardly is that all we are really doing is remembering it, and not after all encountering it for the first time. The section of the dialogue in which we’ll be most interested here – and in your seminars, and for one of the essay options – concerns the paradox of inquiry, and the soul and its relation to (the possibility of) learning. This is illustrated by a famous and striking episode involving geometry. And how often can you say that? We also spoke last week about Socrates’ trial and conviction. This week we’ll look at his execution and his death scene, in Plato’s Phaedo, and more importantly his discussion of the post-mortem fate of the soul. Meno 10 The avowed purpose of the conversation in the Meno is the investigation of the question whether virtue can be taught. Iain will come back to this topic in week 8. The question throws up some interesting problems about the nature of learning and teaching. You could start to consider the question of virtue’s nature, and the possibility of teaching it, whilst you are doing the set reading for this week, and it might come up in seminars too. For the time being we will focus on a particular example of teaching and learning and consider Socrates’ answer to a famous puzzle. If we don’t know what we are looking for, how will we know it when we see it? And indeed how can we begin the search if we don’t know how to direct our investigation? This is Meno’s Paradox, the famous paradox of inquiry. If you imagine searching for a physical object the difficulty here becomes more vivid. Unless you know how big it is you won’t know what sort of bag to take, or whether you need to look behind the fridge. If the thing you are searching for is not a physical object but knowledge of an abstract entity, that is, not the sort of thing you can trip over or spill coffee on, then the difficulties are only multiplied. Plato’s account of learning in the Meno is meant, amongst other things, to address this difficulty. Can we discover things of which we have at present no knowledge? The theory of recollection – anamnesis – is designed to show that we can. Suppose that we have no knowledge not because we have always been in ignorance, but because we once knew but have now forgotten. Learning would then be a matter of coming to (or trying to) remember. The question then arises, how and where and when do we acquire the knowledge that we would need to have to make this theory work? According to the details of the hypothesis, we have never encountered the relevant truths during our lifetime, so if we have the knowledge, though we have forgotten it, we must have acquired it at some time other than our present life. As we will see in the Phaedo, Plato’s view is that the soul is in direct communion with the forms after death. The argument from recollection is wheeled in there to serve as part of a cumulative proof of the immortality of the soul. Question: from what you know about the Forms, what does it tell you about the nature of the soul, that it could be indirect communion with them? Question: can you formulate any sense of what it might mean to be ‘in direct communion with the Forms’? For some sorts of knowledge we need to be reminded by experience, or by being told by someone. These seem to be the sorts of knowledge associated with the changing world of appearances. The soul in its pre-embodied state can of course gain no knowledge of physical empirical things. Those are the province of the sensible world and we need bodies to encounter and explore them. Knowledge of abstract things, however, we can recollect directly based on our experience of the abstract Forms. An example of just such a process of recollection is the famous passage in which Socrates elicits geometrical assertions from a boy with no prior mathematical training. The example proceeds roughly as follows. At every stage Socrates doesn’t say to the boy anything like ‘then you draw this line here, and this line here, to create another square’ rather he asks the boy whether if we draw a line here we get another square. The boy assents and Socrates moves on. 11 Socrates begins by asking the boy, who is ignorant of geometry to look at a square that Socrates has drawn out. The boy does so. Socrates fills the boy in on some measurements. The numbers don’t matter really, but consider the following measurements. Imagine the square has sides that are two feet long. That gives us an area of four square feet. Socrates’ challenge then is to tell him what would be the length of one side of a square whose area was twice as big as the square with which we started. The boy shoots high on the first attempt. With impressive confidence he says that a square of twice the area will have sides of twice the length of those of the original square. You will probably already have seen that this can’t be right. A square with sides twice the length will have an area of four times the size. The boy assents to this when it is sketched out for him. (What else could he do?!) He tries again, knowing that the real answer must be part way between the original length and twice the original length. He goes for one and a half times the length. This, too, fails, as you will no doubt have spotted. A square of side three feet is too big: we want an area of eight square feet and the 3x3 square has an area of nine square feet. So now we know the real answer is between two feet and three feet. As indeed it is, since the answer is the square root of eight. The reason that the boy’s process of narrowing down won’t work is that the number he wants is irrational. The boy admits he doesn’t know what to say. Socrates identifies this as progress – recall his own belief that the only way to make sense of the report of the oracle at Delphi that he was the wisest man in Greece was that he was only wiser than other people because he at least knew that he knew nothing. This is presented as a starting point for serious inquiry and certainly better than bullish belief in one’s own knowledge. The method of elenchus, or Socratic questioning, is designed in part to show that Socrates’ interlocutors don’t know some of the things they start out confidently claiming to know. In this case, there is a perfectly good geometric proof of the answer to Socrates’ question, and he proceeds to elicit it from the boy. Start with the square you know to have area four square feet. Draw in three similar squares so we have a larger square of side length four feet. We agreed that this had four times the area of our original square – 16 square feet – and we only wanted twice. So what we need to do is to remove one half of what we have in front of us. One obvious way to do that is by removing half of each of the four small squares, each of which is the same size as our original square. What we are left with will be half the area of the large square, that is, eight square feet. We can get rid of half of each smaller square simply by drawing in the diagonal of each one, forming by this whole process a new square the points of which touch the middle of each side of the large 4x4 square. It can be seen that this is half the area of the large square, and we can then infer that it must be twice the area of the small square. So the answer to Socrates’ original question, ‘what is the length of each side of a square that has twice the area of a given square?’ is ‘the length of each side is the same as the diagonal of the original square.’ 12 Socrates claims not to teach the boy anything, in the sense of imparting knowledge to the boy that Socrates already has. A natural first reaction to this passage is to think that Socrates in fact clearly does teach the boy, and indeed in a very patient and pedagogically competent way. Question: Do you think Socrates teaches the boy anything (beyond the word ‘diagonal’)? Does the boy learn anything? After the passage with the boy, the dialogue returns to its main theme of whether virtue can be taught. The discussion with the boy has shown at least that mathematical knowledge can be ‘learnt’, which is to say, remembered. Socrates says, …one thing I am ready to fight for as long as I can, in word and act: that is, we shall be better, braver and more active men if we believe it right to look for what we don’t know than if we believe there is no point in looking because what we don’t know we can never discover. (86b-c) This is his answer to Meno’s Paradox, provided ‘what we don’t know’ can be read as ‘what we used to know, but have forgotten’. One purpose of the central exchange about geometry has been to persuade us that it is possible to improve our situation, improve the security of our beliefs and opinions, by inquiry. The unexamined life, Socrates is telling us, is not worth living. There’s some room for doubt, I think, whether Plato believed in the literal truth of the theory of recollection. Certainly in the Meno he could get the results he wanted without it being any more than an allegory on a par with the Cave. In the Phaedo, though, it will resurface as part of an argument for the immortality of the soul, and the status of that argument will depend on what we decide is the status of the theory of recollection in general. We won’t be entering into detailed analysis of this question here. It is worth noting that Plato doesn’t seem to put the whole weight of grounding the possibility of inquiry on the theory of recollection. Read in one way, the latter part of the dialogue, when the discussion reverts to virtue, is designed as a way of showing that the elenctic method – the method of elenchus, or Socratic questioning – can get going based on true beliefs that are not yet knowledge. The paradox of inquiry is solved provided elenchus can start from true belief and end in knowledge. On this view, the theory of recollection can be brought out to explain the perhaps surprising fact that during a process of elenchus we seem to be able – as the boy in the dialogue is able – to distinguish good from bad options at each stage. Socrates asks leading questions, certainly, but the boy offers his own answers, and employs his own critical rational faculty. That he is not being fed the answers by Socrates is illustrated by the fact that he sometimes gets the answers wrong. For an interesting discussion of this reading of the dialogue, see Gail Fine, ‘Inquiry in the Meno’ in Kraut, R. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Plato, Cambridge: CUP. 200-26. Socrates and Meno are joined late in the dialogue, for a brief time, by Anytus. There’s nothing so remarkable about that, but after Anytus leaves in a bit of a huff, Socrates says the following: Anytus seems angry, Meno, and I am not surprised. He thinks I am slandering our statesmen, and moreover he believes himself to be one of them. He doesn’t know what slander really is: if he ever finds out he will forgive me. (Meno, 95c) 13 Which is perhaps also not that remarkable, until you realise that Anytus is about to become one of Socrates’ accusers at his trial. In some ways the discussion of the prospects for teaching virtue, and the governing by virtue of right action, nicely sets up the discussion in the Republic of the training of the Guardian class who will be in charge of the city. We will not focus on this topic in this lecture, as Iain will come back to it later, but the study questions will guide you through this section of the dialogue. Phaedo In the Phaedo, Socrates accepts death with a striking calm, and indeed repeatedly has to comfort his companions and tell them to stop crying. The main way in which he attempts to comfort them is through a series of arguments to the conclusion that the soul is immortal. We’ll look at a couple of them here. The dialogue opens with a discussion of the correct attitude that the philosopher ought to take towards death. We should, says Socrates, welcome it. We spend, he claims, our lives preparing for death by paying greatest attention to those aspects of life to do with the soul and not the body – on intellectual matters rather than on food and drink. Judge for yourselves to what extent you think this is true. Question: do you think this is a distinctively philosophical attitude? Is Socrates justified in thinking of it as preparation for death? If not, what error does he fall into? Once we have spent our lives focused in this way, the final separation of soul from body should be of very much less concern to us than it would be to someone that had dedicated their life to bodily pleasures. For those assuredly come to an end on death, though Socrates is shaping up to make a defence of the view that intellectual pleasures do not. The soul after death is supposed to be in direct communion with the forms. This, of course, is key to the idea of anamnesis, or recollection. The first argument for the immortality of the soul is perhaps rather thin… It is the argument from reciprocal processes. Socrates calls for agreement that something becoming larger must start out smaller, something becoming hotter must start out colder, and so on. So each of these things is generated from its opposite: hot from cold, cold from hot, large from small, small from large, and so on. But death has an opposite: life, so death comes out of life – so far so plausible. But – and you can see, gentle reader, where this is bound – life also has its opposite in death, so life must come out of death. So the soul must have existed before birth in order to come from this state of death into the state of life. As these processes are reciprocal, the process goes round and round: the soul is immortal. Task: pick out the first eight or nine things that seem dodgy to you about this argument! Serious Question: do you think there is anything to this argument? If so what; if not, why not? 14 Next comes the argument from recollection. We start with a nod to the argument in the Meno, in which it is supposedly shown that one can only learn if one already in some sense knows what one is trying to learn. If that is right, then we must have learnt it before we were born (as the example of the boy shows – he had never been trained in geometry but could answer Socrates’ questions). But on this occasion Socrates goes a little further. On top of our ability to learn things of which we have no prior experience in life, Socrates points to our ability to make comparative judgements. When we see two equal length sticks, or two equal bowls of grapes, or what-have-you, we know that they are not exactly equal in all respects, but we see that they are, as Socrates says, striving after equality. We could not know that unless we had some prior knowledge of equality in the abstract. As this is not present in the physical world, the soul must have learnt it before birth. This has two interesting consequences. First, the soul must be immortal, and must migrate from life to life. Second, it must, when existing before birth, come to know the Forms. What the soul learns before birth is not empirical knowledge about the sensible world. As Socrates says in the Meno, that’s something we acquire by investigation or by being told by other people. What the soul learns is the abstract and immutable truths given by knowledge of the changeless Forms. This knowledge allows us to learn (that is, recollect) things about geometry and other abstract matters, perhaps in the way Socrates demonstrates with the example of the squares. *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** The death scene of Socrates in the Phaedo is very moving, and I recommend you read it for yourself if you’re feeling up to it. Plato gives Socrates’ last words as follows: Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget. (Phaedo 118a) Asclepius was the god of healing, and the sacrifice was often given in thanks at a cure having been effected. There are several readings of this. Socrates may in effect beclaiming that death is the cure for life. For an alternative reading, listen to the Plato episode of her radio show, by the incomparable Natalie Haynes. Reading List The best thing to read as supplementary reading this week is the remainder of the Meno (see below) and the Phaedo(which is somewhat longer, but well worth it). If you want additional reading, you should consult the Plato reading list given at the end of last week’s lecture. Don’t forget to look at the Plato entries on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online, and to do a search on JSTOR.org for relevant papers, particularly if you are planning to write your essay on this topic. As always, if you come across something and you want to check whether it’s worth your while spending a few hours reading it, just ask. The literature on Plato is vast and growing, and it’s much better that you do some research of your own and see what’s available than that I give you a small handful of things to read. 15 The main thing is to read Plato himself, and more or less anything else you manage to read in addition will be of some value. Just avoid websites written by cranks and you should be ok. Seminar Reading This week’s basic seminar reading is Plato’s Meno. The main section for our purposes (to which the Study Questions directly relate) is (80-100). If you don’t yet know what those numbers mean, look at last week’s notes. If you’re reading online, don’t forget to go the Perseus Digital Library. If you are enjoying Plato, just read the whole of the Meno (70-100) – it’s not much more, and it will be one complete Platonic dialogue under your belt. If you’re reading a book with no Stephanus numbers in it, just read the whole thing. It’s only 40 small pages. Week 5: Plato on the Tripartite Soul and the Ideal State My notes: Western Philosophy as a series of footnotes to plato? - Not direct commentary on PLato - Not a development of Plato’s explicit ideas - Rather that Plato began many of the debates with which we are still concerned. Plato gives us the origins of many contemporary debates - In epistemology in the Theaetetus - In metaphysics, with the Theory of Forms - In moral and political philosophy, in the Republic, how to produce the best society and live the best life. Plato’s answers are often wrong, but his questions were right — and the right sort of — questions. The tripartite theory of the soul The soul has three parts: 1. Reason: thinking and intelligence 2. Spirit: action and activity, anger and courage 3. Appetite: desires and physical needs Four Virtues of Good State (Kalliposis) - Wisdom: acquired from the proper function of the rational parts of our soul 16  - Courage: from the spirited part - Discipline: when the three parts are in harmony - Justice: when each part is performing the function special to it. The ideal state wants to demonstrate these four virtues. The components of the soul illustrate the components of the state. The harmony of the individual character is analogous to the harmony of the state. Justice in the soul - requires the parts of the soul to do their own thing Relation of the Soul to the State (the state and the soul have an isomorphic relationship) Tripartite structure of the state - The Guardians: rulers - The Auxiliaries: police and army - The Artisans: farmers, physicians, builders, etc. For the state to be just, the parts of the state must be in harmony with each other and doing their work/minding their own business. The Guardians - Those people that represent wisdom and rationality and are in overall charge - They are philosophers! - They have escaped the cave and see things as they really are by the light of the sun, i.e. people that have appreciation of the Forms - As such, they know how to arrange the state/how everyone should behave to everyone’s best interest. - The Guardians live a simple life with no distractions. They do not have luxury, wealth or property, and live their lives in common. They share everything with each other, including children and spouses. The Auxiliaries - Corresponding to the spirited part of the soul. - Enforce the laws made by the rulers. - Defend the state from outside attack. The Artisans - Corresponding to the appetitive part of the soul 17  - All trades, doctors, smiths, architects, etc. - Take care of the health of the state. For there to be balance, the rational part must be in charge (like in the soul). - each part must play their own role, mind their own business. - If everyone plays their own role, all the state’s needs are met. - people are fed, clothed, housed - people are defended - people behave in an orderly and well-regulated way. ‘Minding their own business’ - in the soul, the parts have no way of deciding to try their hand at something different. - In the state there is clearly more autonomy — in one sense there is nothing to stop a ruler waking up and deciding to try being a farmer - Plato goes to some lengths to correct for this. The Ideal State - individuals are of secondary importance - individuals do the actual work, but their work is directed to by use to the collective. - The ruler must decide who does what: everyone should do the thing for which they are best suited. The ‘Noble Lie’ - people must be willing to go where they are told and serve the state in the best way - citizens are to be told that people have metal in their souls - Some have gold, i.e. Guardians - Some have silver, i.e. auxiliaries - Some have iron and bronze, i.e. artisans. - Corresponding to this metal is a person’s place in society - Social mobility relative to one's parents is possible. Lecture notes, provided: Introductory Remarks Last week we saw Plato using the notion of the soul to help him to explain some puzzles about the process and mechanism of learning. 18 The theory may well be at least partly allegorical, and it will have struck some of you, I think, as downright silly. A word is in order about why it isn’t silly, even if it is completely wrong. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously said that perhaps the safest general description of Western Philosophy is as a series of footnotes to Plato. What Whitehead meant by that, I think, can’t have been that the whole of the history of Western Philosophy, or even that bit of it that he thought had been worthwhile, consisted in direct commentary on Plato (though certainly some of it has done), and it also can’t have been that anything worth being called philosophy was a taking up and a development of Plato’s explicit ideas, or even his general programme. (Again, some of it has done that, but a minority.) What he must have meant – and here he is much closer to the truth, though perhaps still over-egging the pudding a little bit – is that Plato began many of the debates with which Western Philosophy has been concerned ever since and can serve to a greater or lesser extent as the model of how to go about addressing those debates. Now, of course, Plato writes in dialogue form, and we needn’t do that. There is also a long tradition (neglected, but revived by Jay Kennedy – see reading list) of holding that not all of the import of Plato’s writing is visible, as it were, in the explicit arguments. Some of it is revealed only by studying the form and structure as well as the surface content. We also don’t need to do philosophy like this – embedding dense layers of meaning-upon-meaning (though feel free if you have a LOT of spare time, or are a surpassing genius). We don’t even need to study Plato like that to get important stuff out of him. But Plato does present us with a clear ancestor of modern epistemology, in the shape of the discussion in the Theaetetus, clear metaphysical puzzles in the problem of resemblance – the One Over Many – which he tackled by developing the Theory of Forms and, with the Republic, systematic discussion of how to produce the best society and how to live the best life: questions still of central concern to moral and political philosophers. So although Plato’s answers may have often been wrong, his questions were the right – and perhaps even more importantly the right sort of – questions. He was doing philosophy in a sense, and in a way, that we can recognise. Socrates is very clear in the early dialogues that proper philosophical investigation begins with getting straight our definitions. You can take a leaf straight out of Plato’s bookfor your essay writing: start by defining your terms or the rest of your discussion will flounder in equivocation and ambiguity. Once 19 we have our definitions we can proceed to interrogate the arguments of our opponents, as Socrates does with his interlocutors. So it’s far from silly. It’s philosophy of the highest order. But it’s sometimes difficult to grasp, and in order to find the take-home message for us reading Plato today, with our knowledge of the rest of the history of philosophy, science, history, literature, we do often have to do a bit of digging. In this course we can do no more than scratch the surface – again, many small sections of the Republic have spawned multiple book-length discussions and innumerable papers – but a sense of the riches there to be found is a valuable thing, and can be got from the sort of snappy tour in which we find ourselves engaged. Just to stress this point again: everything I’ve just said is compatible with most or all of Plato’s answers being only partial answers, or even with their being false. *** This week we’ll consider Plato’s tripartite theory of the soul, and see the use Plato makes of it in expounding on the nature and structure of the ideal state. The Nature of the Soul In the Republic Plato appeals at several points in the argument to the notion of a ‘tripartite’ soul. That is, a soul that has three component parts. These parts are reason, spirit and appetite, and they must be in harmony for the individual to be in harmony, to display discipline and behave justly. ‘Reason’ is fairly easy to grasp: our reason is the thinking part of the soul, the intelligence, the part capable of rational deliberation and philosophical reflection. ‘Spirit’ is meant not in the sense suggested by ‘spiritual’ but in the sense suggested by ‘spirited’. That is, the part of our souls responsible for spurring us into action. In some translations you will find references to the action of this part of the soul translated as things like ‘anger’ and ‘indignation’. It may be that none of these translations captures everything Plato had in mind, but collectively they give us the shape of the idea that Plato was appealing to. ‘Appetite’ is what it sounds like. Our appetites govern our interaction with, and desire for, the physical necessities and pleasures: food, drink, and sex, but also things like shelter, clothing, etc. 20  Question: leaving aside the talk in terms of souls, do you think that Plato’s division of the aspects of one’s character captures something essential or important about human beings? Human beings do not all or always behave justly and act in a well-governed way, and this theory of the soul can give us an explanation of why that should be. Notice the familiar philosophical technique: identify a problem (in this case certain aspects of human behaviour) and devise a systematic theory to account for the phenomena. This counts as a motivation for accepting the theory: it can solve some of the problems we want to solve. That motivation is, of course, capable of being defeated: we might have even stronger grounds for believing something incompatible with this theory, we might make new observations that the theory can’t account for, and so on. But as a starting point, if a new theory can solve some problems for us, that counts in its favour. Plato appeals to four virtues: wisdom, courage, discipline and justice. We get wisdom through the proper functioning of the rational part of our souls, courage via the spirited part. The three parts of the soul must exist in harmony for the soul to be disciplined and each part should take care of its own role in order that the soul, and therefore the individual, be just. The harmony is brought about by the soul being under the right influence of reason. In the Republic this talk of virtues starts by considering the virtues that might be had by a perfect state. The whole of the Republic is an extended discussion of justice, and the outlining of the ideal state is brought in to facilitate this discussion. The outlining of the soul is then brought in to prop up the claims about the ideal state: if we can find the same sort of rules governing the state and the individual then it starts to look as though getting a handle on one will allow us better to understand the other. As you’ll see in the tutorial reading, the soul – and by extension the individual – can be just only if the parts of thesoul are taking care of their own functions, and everything else is under the control of reason. So, human beings will be fine provided the appetites are taking care of impelling us towards food and the rest, spirit is making us defend our honour and protect our pursuit of flourishing, and reason isgoverning and guiding the whole system. The state can itself only be just if its parts act in harmony. As we’ll see below, this is in the first place a matter of the proper functioning of different classes. But each class will function properly only if its members function properly, and that is a matter of the souls of individuals displaying the virtues of discipline and justice. 21 In the case of the soul, the appetite cannot function except to impel us towards the things we desire in one way or another. The spirited part of the soul can do nothing other than make us act to resist aggressors or protect our interests. So these two components of the soul have their functions described fairly clearly. It seems a small step to say that in order for them to behave with discipline and justice we must not only desire food, but desire the right amount of the right sort of food, and that is a question for the intellectual component of us – the rational part of the soul. So the individual can only be properly disciplined and just, can only behave morally, if the different parts of the soul are allowed to get on with their own particular tasks and the rational part of the soul is in overall charge. If we can draw an analogy between the individual and the state then we are well on the way to a model for understanding how discipline and justice might work in the state as well. The Relation of the Soul to the State The state, in the Republic, is presented as having a similar three-part structure to the soul, and here again the parts must be in harmony for justice to be achieved. I have just said that the working of the soul is relatively intuitive: we have appetites and passions, and we are better off if these are regulated by reason. But states also have, in an analogous sense, appetites. The people that make up the citizenry need to be fed, watered, clothed, and housed. Similarly they have need of a spirited component: aggression against the state must be repelled, and disorder within the state be somehow managed. That suggests a couple of component groups for the state to include: first the artisans or farmers, second the soldiery or police. But we want the state to be harmonious and just. Harmony is a matter of the part of the state analogous to reason playing the governing role. Rational people should be in charge since they are in the best position to know what is best for everyone in the state. In the case of the state as Plato outlines it, this means the philosophers – those exemplifying justice and wisdom – being in overall charge. These rulers are called the Guardians. Having, as it were,left the cave and come to know the Form of the Good, the philosophers are now in a position to judge rightly what each situation requires, and guide the state to act justly. Corresponding to the spirited part of the soul are the ‘Auxiliaries’. These are strictly speaking another subdivision of the Guardian class, alongside the rulers proper, and they enforce the rules made by the 22 rulers and defend the state against outside attack. They, too, must play their role in order for the state to be just. Thirdly there are the artisans, or craftsmen. This class includes all tradesmen, doctors, smiths, and so on. The class as a whole corresponds in our analogy to the appetitive part of the soul. People in this class, when properly directed by the rulers, nourish the state, taking care of its health just as our appetites, when guided by reason, will nourish us as individuals. Just as in the soul, the rational part must be in charge in order for the state to be disciplined, and every part must perform its own role, governed by the rational part, in order for the state to be just. Plato talks about the various parts doing their own thing and minding their own business. This might seem a bit strange, since the top two sections have explicitly as part of their role the governing or regulating of the groups below them. But these two things are compatible. It is the job of the rulers to rule. Of course they have to rule someone, so their particular job involves an interest in the affairs of the auxiliaries and the artisans. But the Guardians should not try to do the work of the auxiliaries and the artisans. For the Guardians, minding their own business involves taking an interest in the other groups, and laying down laws to govern their activity, but not in then being subject to those laws, fighting in wars or building houses and growing crops. Note that ‘minding their own business’ emphatically does not mean for Plato, ‘looking out for number one’. What matters throughout is the production and maintenance of the best state. The business of the Guardians is to act in the best interests of the state, not to make their own lives and the lives of their friends as comfortable as possible. I carefully draw no modern parallels to this line of thought. Similarly in the just soul, it is the part of reason to govern the activity of the spirited and appetitive parts, but not to take over the functions of those parts. Our anger should be tempered and properly directed by our reason, and our appetites should be indulged and resisted as reason dictates, but the rational part of the soul is not itself responsible for impelling us towards the things we desire or repelling outside attack. It simply oversees the other faculties whose job it is to do those things. You might think that in the case of the state, but not the soul, the various groups have a choice whether to play their allotted role, since the auxiliaries could decide to try their hand at baking bread, but my anger couldn’t at the same time be my desire for cakes. That’s broadly true, and could be part of the reason why Plato goes to such pains in the Republic to explain how the right sorts of people ought tobe directed into each walk of life. It is also, it seems to me, the reason why the theory of the soul is appealed to as support for the theory of the state: we can be more confident that we have 23 understood the right workings of the soul in generating the right behaviour in individuals, as the faculties have clearly delineated jobs that the other faculties cannot impinge upon. If we are satisfied that that’s how individuals work, and we can buy into a more or less broad analogy between how individuals work and how the city should work, then we can see how Plato arrives at the division of labour, and the class structure, that he does in the Republic. Question: Do you see the analogy between individual and state? If so, how strong is the analogy? If not, where does it break down? The Ideal State in the Republic One striking feature of Plato’s political philosophy in the Republic is that the ideal that’s being sought is the ideal state, not the ideal life for any or all individuals taken by themselves. This will recur in Aristotle, with his notion of the ideal flourishing human life recognising some tension between personal flourishing and the needs of the polis, or city. You might recall in the final third of the Meno Socrates argues that the virtuous person will, amongst other things, be useful. In particular, the virtuous person will be good for the state. This is almost taken for granted in the Meno, but in the Republic it is spelt out quite clearly how each person must play their role if the state is to be just and harmonious. One big requirement of political philosophy, then, on Plato’s view, is making sure that the right people are doing the right jobs. No good will come for the state if a naturally gifted blacksmith is put in charge, or a solider set to tend the fields. The first problem is deciding, early enough in their lives, which people are suited to which jobs. This task is given to the Guardians and takes place at the end of the period of basic education, once people have been subjected to certain sorts of tests to determine their particular skills, capacities and suitability for certain roles. Once people and social roles have successfully been matched up, the ideal state requires that we be able to distribute people across society so they are doing the appropriate jobs. As this is a task for the Guardians, they need to be able to convince people to go in the direction that’s needed, even if they don’t agree that, for example, their place in life is mucking out the horses. Plato defends the ‘noble lie’ or ‘magnificent myth’. We might say the following things: 24  Plato intends the education of the Guardians to be open to women as well as men The state will be just only to the extent that members of each of the classes that make it up stick to their own roles Everyone must fill the role for which they are best suited It is possible to move into a different class from one’s parents Suppose we were to put it about that in the soul of each person is some element of a certain metal: some people have gold, some silver and others bronze in their soul. Then we can say that golden people are suited to being Guardians, silver people to being Auxiliaries, and bronze people to being artisans. If this were to be widely believed, then people would be more likely to accept the judgements of the rulers that a child born to Auxiliaries actually had bronze in his soul and should go and be a farmer, or that a blacksmith’s daughter was actually to go and be educated as a Guardian owing to the gold in her soul. That, at least, would be the theory. It’s worth noting that Plato is happy that the Guardians should believe this myth as well, so he’s not proposing a system in which the educated few impose their will on the mass of the ignorant public by lying to them. The point is that the lie serves a purpose, namely, the good end of the city. The myth is this: …the upbringing and the education we have given [the citizens] was all something that happened only in a dream. In reality they were fashioned and reared, and their arms and equipment manufactured, in the depths of the earth, and Earth herself, their mother, brought them up, when they were complete, into the light of day; so now they must think of the land in which they live as their mother and protect her if she is attacked, while their fellow-citizens they must regard as brothers born of the same mother earth. We shall […] address our citizens as follows: ‘You are, all of you in this land, brothers. But when God fashioned you he added gold in the composition of those of you who are qualified to be Rulers (which is why their prestige is greatest); he put silver in the Auxiliaries, and iron and bronze in the farmers and the rest. Now since you are all of the same stock, though children will commonly resemble their parents, occasionally a silver child will be born of golden parents, or a golden child of silver parents, and so on. Therefore the first and most important of God’s commandments to the Rulers is that they must exercise their function as Guardians with particular care in watching the mixture of metals in the characters of the children. If one of their own children has bronze or iron in its make-up, they must harden their hearts, and degrade it to the ranks of the industrial and agricultural class where it properly belongs: similarly, if a child of this class is born with gold or silver in its 25  nature, they will promote it appropriately to be a Guardian or an Auxiliary. For they know that there is a prophecy that the state will be ruined when it has Guardians of silver or bronze.’ That is the story. Do you think there is any way of making them believe it? ​‘Not in the first generation,’ he said, ‘but you might succeed with the second and later generations.’ ​‘Even so it should serve to increase their loyalty to the state and to each other. For I think that’s what you mean.’ (Republic 414e-415c) Question: Might it work? Would it be morally defensible even if it were shown to be technically feasible? The ruling class. As I’ve said, we shouldn’t think that Plato is proposing a city in which a privileged elite live a luxurious life and lord it over the rest of the citizens whilst feathering their own nests. The Guardians will have their material needs met, but they will not own much property for their private use, or even have private family life. They will live as a community of friends, sharing such things in common. That ‘such things’ includes children (and wives, Plato says, though we can substitute ‘spouses’ since Plato thinks the Guardianship should be open to women as well as men). That, combined with the idea that people will fill the role in the state to which they are best suited, suggests that it will be quite difficult to find people to be Guardians. That’s true, but perhaps ought not to be surprising. Perhaps if it were a little harder for unsuitable people to join the political elite we might be a step closer to the ideal state.The Guardians’ position, with their communal life and their lack of personal property, will be unattractive to the majority of people, and this will serve to discourage unsuitable people from trying to storm their way in to being Guardians. Question: Do you think the end result – of having a state arranged on these sorts of class lines – is desirable (even if you disapprove of Plato’s proposed method of achieving it, or doubt that his method could work)? If you think that overall it’s undesirable, for whatever reason, do you think it has any redeeming features? Women in the Ideal State. Plato is clear that the education for the Guardians should be available to girls as well as boys, and the position of Guardian should be open to women as well as to men. The Guardians should be drawn from the most capable and suitable people in the state, regardless of sex. 26 The difference between women and men – to put it delicately, their different roles in the production of the next generation of children – have no bearing on the other roles necessary for the good running of the state. We want, unselfishly and without bias, to have the best people doing each of the jobs needed by the city. That means not automatically cutting off half of the available pool of talent by denying some positions to some people on grounds of sex. We should be wary of thinking of Plato as a feminist in this regard, and we should ask ourselves whether the combination of this apparently enlightened attitude to talent is soured in any way by the very heavy-handed and paternalistic policies in evidence elsewhere in the Republic(Karl Popper levelled the charge of totalitarianism at Plato– see reading list), but there are nevertheless at least these hopeful proto-feminist glimmers. Slavery. Plato doesn’t deal directly with the question of slavery when outlining the ideal state. There are a couple of mentions here and there, but it doesn’t seem to have been a pressing issue for him. Some have read the lack of explicit discussion as evidence that Plato did not intend the ideal city to contain slaves, but Gregory Vlastos has argued quite persuasively that this reading is unlikely. The argument hinges in part on the observation that when Plato wanted to defend an element of his ideal state that went sharply and clearly against the status quo of the Athens of his day, he was clear and forceful in doing so. In the case of slavery, he hardly mentions it, and it was of course a large part of life in Classical Athens. For more on this, see the two papers by Vlastos listed in this week’s supplementary reading. Reading List Here are some additional things mentioned in these notes. You should refer to the lecture notes for week 3 for the general books and collections of essays that might be of interest, and don’t forget to read the articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online, and browse JSTOR.org and Google Scholar for suitable journal articles. As ever, if in any doubt, or if you want any more guidance, let me know. Kennedy, Jay. 2011. The Musical Structure of Plato’s Dialogues. Durham: Acumen Publishing. (Available through the library as an eBook, though it is quite difficult, and not required for this module.) Popper, Karl. 2012. The Open Society and its Enemies. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. (Also available as online access through the library.) Vlastos, Gregory. 1941. ‘Slavery in Plato’s Thought’. The Philosophical Review 50: 289-304. 27 Vlastos, Gregory. 1968. ‘Does Slavery Exist in Plato’s Republic?’. Classical Philology 63: 291-5. (The Vlastos papers are both available via JSTOR.) Tutorial Reading This week’s required reading is Republic book IV (427a – 449a) Good supplementary primary source reading for this week is other sections of the Republic. If you have time, start with book III and the remainder of book IV Week 7: Socrates and Plato 1. Was there ever a real Socrates? How do we know there is such a historical figure as Socrates? Socrates lived during a period of war between Athens and Sparta — the Peloponnesian War (find a book on the Peloponnesian war?). The literary society of ancient Greece allowed for many historical documents to be written by people who went through the war, so people wrote historical account of Socrates. - Historical Accounts describing Socrates (Xenophon) - Memoirs describing Socrates (Xenophon, Memorabilia) - Plays in which Socrates is a character, a satirical figure (Aristophanes ‘The Clouds’) - Philosophy (Plato, originally wanted to keep Socrates philosophy alive) Socrates seems to have had followers, younger people who looked up to and followed him. One of these was Plato. Socrates was famously ugly, which is why he might have been chosen to represent the philosophers in the plays. We think… - Socrates was born in 469 BCE - His father was a stonemason, and Socrates may have begun training to become one too. - But the war intervened, and he served in the Athenian army as a hoplite (a general soldier). - He fought in several battles between 432-422 on the side of Athens. 28  - He fought with some distinction, showing great courage. - In one battle, he saved the life of a general called Alcibiades. - Alcibiades and Socrates had a romance after Socrates saves Alcibiades' life (Socrates in one dialogue tries to convince Alcibiades that they should stop having a sexual relationship — i.e. a ‘platonic relationship’) - Alcibiades defected to Sparta, making him a traitor in the eyes of many Athenians. Socrates became the lover of a traitor. - A friend of Socrates went to speak to the Oracle at Delphi (the Delphic Oracle) and asked ‘Who is the wisest person in Greece?’, to which the answer was Socrates. - Socrates answered that he didn’t know anything, so this made no sense. - He started talking to people known generally to be wise, like the Sophists (they claim they have wisdom and can teach it to others — professional teachers of wisdom). He would ask them questions regarding the thing they claim to have wisdom of, the method of elenchos (questioning). - Socrates concluded that he must be wise because he is the only person who admits that he doesn’t actually know anything. - Socrates claimed he was a Gadfly. He was annoying, but he was trying to educate the state of Athens to show them that the Sophists don’t know anything and they shouldn’t be making money. - About 406 BCE, Socrates ended up as one of the rulers of the city due to the random selection of rulers that they tried out at some point. He ended up administering the rules for a very important trial, in which generals who had failed an attempt at sea travel (leading to the deaths of many soldiers). People were very angry, and wanted the generals to be executed without a trial. Socrates attempts to prevent this, and fails. - A few years later, Athens switched political leadership where it is ruled by ‘the Thirty’. - The Thirty send a group to find a runaway they want to execute. Socrates refuses to do this. - 399 BCE, Socrates is put on trial for failing to worship the gods and corrupting the youth. Really, it was probably political payback. Socrates made A LOT of enemies. - Socrates is found guilty and sentenced to death. Most Athenians who were sentenced to death were expected to escape and to go into exile, but Socrates refused to escape, saying this would make him a hypocrite. 2. Even if there is a real Socrates, can we distinguish Socrates from Plato? Internal to Plato’s Dialogues 29 Style Length: Some short Type of Dialogue: good arguments from others, elenchus. Ending: ‘No way forward’, aporia. These types of dialogues are usually Socratic. Content The soul: immortal or not? Socrates does not defend the immortality of the soul. The Forms: do they exist? Socrates does not defend the existence of the Forms. Focus on ethics in Socratic dialogues Soul: desire can defeat reason External from Plato’s Dialogues Xenophon Justice is wisdom. Wrongdoing comes from ignorance — if you know the good, you will do it. Just ethics, no metaphysics, etc. Aristotle Distinguishes Socrates from (e.g.) “the Socrates of…” Ethics “universal definitions” — accounts of justice, piety, etc… (not nature as a whole) Dating the dialogues - we don’t know when the dialogues are written - the dialogues are usually split into early, middle and later dialogues - early dialogues are characterised by being Socratic, not the other way around. BUT it could be that Plato is writing in different styles for different people, and so time of writing doesn’t really play a part. Vlastos first argued that Socrates should be viewed as a philosopher in his own right. Irwin agreed mostly with Vlastos. 30 Research - History of the Gospels Vocabulary Prudence: caring for your future self. aproria: 31