Week 1 - Introduction and Plato Flashcards
SOCRATES 470 BC to 399 BC
He was put to death 2,400 years ago for asking too many questions. If philosophy has a patron saint, it is Socrates.
He was the founding father of moral philosophy
Everyone in Athens agreed that there had never been anyone like him and probably would not be again. He was unique.
Over and over again he demonstrated in the marketplace that people didn’t know what they thought they knew.
He loved to reveal the limits of what people genuinely understood.
The word ‘philosopher’ comes from the Greek words meaning ‘love of wisdom’. The kind of wisdom that it values is based on argument, reasoning and asking questions.
He didn’t not have any doctrines or dogmas. He didn’t see himself as a teacher.
‘The only thing I know is that I know nothing’ he is reported as saying.
Athens as a whole didn’t value Socrates as highly as Plato. He was allegedly becoming a dangerous and subversive influence, particularly with respect to the young.
Meletus claimed Socrates was neglecting the Athenian Gods and introducing new gods of his own. Socrates was taken to court and charged with impiety and corrupting Athenian youth.
Socrates refused to bow to his judges and to stop philosophising.
He refused to recant and repent, was found guilty and ordered to put himself to death, which he did by drinking hemlock - a plant that gradually paralyses the body.
If he had the choice to carry on living quietly, not asking any more difficult questions, he would not take it. He’d rather die than that.
The authorities had their revenge, but Socrates achievements survived him and them. The Socratic method retains its importance today.
PLATO (Dialogue with Miles Burnyeat)
The subject of philosophy, as it is often conceived—a rigorous and systematic examination of ethical, political, metaphysical, and epistemological issues, armed with a distinctive method—can be called his invention. Few other authors in the history of Western philosophy approximate him in depth and range: perhaps only Aristotle (who studied with him), Aquinas, and Kant would be generally agreed to be of the same rank.
The sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin - Plato
If the pre-Socratic philosophers can be said to have had one common concern it was an attempt to find universal principles which would explain the whole of nature.
Socrates maintained however, that what we most need to learn is not how nature works but how we ourselves ought to live.
Plato was a pupil of Socrates; in fact, it is from Plato’s writings that most of our knowledge of Socrates derives.
Plato founded a famous school in Athens called the Academy, which was the prototype of what we now call a University. Many connoisseurs regard his prose as the finest Greek prose ever to have been written.
Platonic dialogues defined the literary genre subsequent philosophers used. Plato wrote approximately 30 dialogues, in most of which Socrates is the main character. Strictly speaking, the term refers to works in which Socrates is a character.
In some ways Plato was the Shakespeare of his day.
The discussion of moral and philosophical problems between two or more characters in a dialogue is an illustration of one version of the Socratic method.
The Socratic method is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presumptions.
It is a dialectical method, involving a discussion in which the defense of one point of view is questioned; one participant may lead another to contradict themselves in some way, thus weakening the defender’s point.
The Socratic method is a method of hypothesis elimination, in that better hypotheses are found by steadily identifying and eliminating those that lead to contradictions.
To keep the alive the Socratic spirit for Plato meant to go on doing philosophy in the way Socrates had done it: an eternal questioning.
The process gradually leads Plato to develop his own ideas both in ethics and other areas of philosophy.
Most, although not all, of the dialogues are called by the name of the one of the people to who, Socrates is talking in them: thus we have the Phaedo, the Laches, the Euthypro, the Theatetus, the Parmenides, the Timaeus, and so on. The most famous are the Republic and the Symposium.
Plato’s portrait of Socrates makes the claim: here is a man who thought for himself and who could overthrow long-cherished conclusions if it turned out that they were wrong.
Because our assumptions and beliefs are open to perpetual questioning, ‘conclusions’ don’t have any special status. They are merely staging posts on the road to further inquiries.
Platonic definition
1/ Of or associated with the Greek philosopher Plato or his ideas.
2/ Confined to words, theories, or ideals, and not leading to practical action. “a Platonic gesture”
Plato’s most important positive doctrines:
1/ Learning is recollection
The Platonic doctrine of recollection or anamnesis, is the idea that we are born possessing all knowledge and our realisation of that knowledge is contingent on our discovery of it. Knowledge is part of the essential nature of your soul which you possessed before you were born.
(Note: this was the period in which he came to believe that the soul exists before birth, its embodiment in our present world being just one of a series of reincarnations.)
In the Meno, Plato produces a theory of Socratic or philosophical discussion according to which we all have latent within our minds the knowledge of the correct answers to these questions:
‘What is courage?’
What is justice?’
That knowledge, deep back within us and not immediately accessible, is what enables us to knock down all the wrong answers and show that they are wrong.
We all tend to make the assumption that discussion can get at the truth, yet it has no special power to do that. The most that discussion can show is that our conclusions either are or are not consonant with our premises.
2/ The Theory of Forms (Platonism)
The theory of Forms or theory of Ideas (Platonic ideas) is his argument that non-physical (but substantial) forms (or ideas) represent the most accurate reality. Beauty and justice exist on their own and apart.
The world that appears to our senses is in some way defective and filled with error, but there is a more real and perfect realm, populated by entities (called “forms” or “ideas”) that are eternal, changeless, and in some sense paradigmatic for the structure and character of the world presented to our senses. (Stanford Encyclopaedia)
Platonism has had a significant influence on Christianity.
It is ok to use the phrase ‘the world of Forms’, provided one understands it to mean the realm of invariable generalities.
Other philosophers have tried writing dialogues, in both ancient and modern times - Xenophon, Cicero, Augustine, Berkeley, Hume. But the only name on the list who comes anywhere near Plato is Hume. This is because it’s more about the process of journeying towards the answers than caring about them.
The inquiry need never stop, because every ‘conclusion for now’ leads on to the next problem.
The Republic enacts a conviction that inquiry really does not cease until death. The central task of the book is to show that justice is a benefit to its possessor.
One of the extraordinary things about Plato is that he established a relationship with his readers such that when writing one work he can take it for granted that his readers have read his previous works.
He uses this relationship not only to make allusions and build up resonances, but also to create surprises when he departs from his readers’ expectations. He also conducts a public self-scrutiny of his own earlier ideas.
Another middle period dialogue is the Timaeus. It stands aside because it contains more cosmology and science than philosophy, but mostly because it also contains a wonderfully poetic creation myth.
Plato’s divine craftsman is mathematical intelligence at work in the world.
He wanted to see the entire universe as the product of order imposed on disorder, and by order he meant mathematical order.
It’s a poetic way of explaining the intelligibility of the world.
The cosmology and science in the Timaeus are the practical working out of some of the possibilities canvassed in the Republic.
Plato deeply cared about the idea that mathematical regularities and harmonies and proportions are what explain things.
From the efforts of the leading mathematicians whom Plato gathered in the Academy, stem many of the greatest achievements of Greek mathematical science down to Ptolemy. Ptolemy’s astronomy is the ultimate descendant of the astronomy done in the Academy with backing of Plato’s recommendations for the sciences.
And since mathematical order is the expression for Plato of goodness and beauty, these sciences which show us the world as mathematically intelligible are simultaneously sciences of value.
Plato and Aristotle are both anti-materialist philosophers.
It was no accident that when the modern scientific enterprise got going, it did so by throwing the Aristotelianism which had so dominated the Middle Ages. Platonism, by contrast, is much easier to reconcile with the modern scientific enterprise, which is why it lived on in the Renaissance and later.
Platonism is a philosophy you can use or be influenced by if you are seeking to show how science and spiritual values can be reconciled.
