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Stephen J. Marotta

A Brief History of the Totality of Western Thought

Part 3: Thales to Aristotle

* Plato

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The long version with the kind of context you might get from an undergraduate class on Plato.

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We will save the "short version" for our focused continuation of the conversation through the lenses we are using to interpret the conversation as a whole nested in the larger cultural project as a whole.

 

We Left off with Socrates

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The problem is raised by the professions of ignorance from Socrates, and the idea that the Elenchus could ever do what it seems designed to do, produce knowledge. I can’t inquire after any truths at all because I either know what I am inquiring after (in which case there is no point in inquiring) or I don’t know, in which case I will never know it when I come across it.

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We talked about how this may be a problem for those who want to affirm propositions, but it wasn't a problem for the project as Socrates conceptualized it.

Part 3

A Brief History of the Totality of Western Thought

Part 3 of 8: Thales through Aristotle

Plato thinks he can resolve this problem, with the doctrine of recollection.

 

Plato gives us the Justified True Belief

  • This is a definition of knowledge used in philosophy with few exceptions for most of the history of philosophy.

  • It has three parts.

    • In order for someone to say: "I know" something they have to:

      • Believe that thing

      • Have good reason to believe that thing

      • that thing has to correspond to reality.

 

The doctrine or "recollection" gives us the ability to know things; and so, unlike Socrates, we need a definition of knowledge.

 

Comment on JTB, flushing it out, and looking at Gettier

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If a person believes that the sky is blue (which corresponds to reality, in this example); and they believe this even though they are blind and only knew ONE PERSON in their entire life, and that person has repeatedly lied to them about almost everything they have ever told them, and the person believes that the sky is blue only because this repeated liar has said that it is; then they do not know that the sky is blue, because they don't have good reason to support their belief, even though it is true.

 

If a person has good reason to believe that corn is a kind of grass because they have studied biology and taxonomy and understand the categories, and worked for 30 years as a biologist for an agricultural company studying corn. (and the statement "corn is a grass" is a true statement in this example). BUT, the biologist had a dream last night that he and all his colleagues have been wrong forever about the nature of corn, and the dream gave him no reason but the horror of the thought has stayed with him for a week and he just can't shake the idea that corn is in fact not a grass... he doesn't KNOW that corn is a grass because he no longer believes it.

 

If a person believes that tomorrow is Saturday because he usually is right about the day and does not know that yesterday he was drugged unaware and lost 24 hours without knowing it AND because most of his friends are always right about the day, and they confirm that tomorrow is Saturday BUT by a freak set of circumstances all these people who are usually reliable about what day it is are just somehow wrong; a freak accident has happened at google and everyone's phones and computers are telling them the wrong day for some reason. Even though he believes tomorrow is Saturday, and even though he has good reason to believe that tomorrow is Saturday; he does not KNOW that tomorrow is Saturday because tomorrow is actually Sunday.

 

But, if a person believes something, and has good reason to believe something, and that thing is true; then a man can be said to "know" that thing. According to this definition.

 

What is remarkable about this definition is that it has received very little challenge in the history of philosophy. It works pretty well and is largely used (I mean, we argue about everything, but this is less controversial over the time and occurrences of philosophical talk.

 

What is really remarkable is that a student of philosophy who died in 2021 wrote a quick short (3 pages!) paper arguing that this definition doesn't work, and it took the world by storm. The conversation of philosophy, and all the endless questionable things, are still alive, baby! He was either an Instructor, an assistant professor or an associate professor of philosophy in 1963 when he wrote this tiny piece which devastated an idea that philosophers have held to for thousands of years.

 

He did this by offering counter examples to the JTB: what if a man is tricked into believing something with very good reasons to believe in it, and what if that thing just happens to also be true?

 

Example: there are sheep in a field, but they all happen to be standing behind rocks, so that you cannot see any of them from your vantage point. The night before, a prankster filled the field with fake sheep statues which look very real and which no one in the world can imagine why he did this, it isn't a normal thing to do and has never been done before. Because you see the fake sheep, and they look real, you believe that there are sheep in the field. There are sheep in the field. You believe there are sheep in the field. You have good reason to believe it because it looks like it and it would be unreasonable to think that you cannot believe your eyes in this situation... but you don't really KNOW that there are sheep in the field.

 

Similar: You and one other man are waiting for an interview for a job. The man in the room with you happens to empty his pockets onto the table and then put the objects back into his pocket after showing you they were fully emptied. You count the coins and they amount to 37 cents. The man has his interview. You go to the bathroom. you bump into the CEO of the company who is a friend of yours, and he confides in you that they have decided to hire the other guy, even though they will keep looking for a spot for you in the company. You go to the bathroom. You believe that the man who will get the job has 37 cents in his pocket. while you are in the bathroom a fax comes in from the FBI informing the CEO that the man they are thinking of hiring is a criminal with a false identity. The CEO decides they are not going to hire that man, and will go with you instead. You are about to leave the bathroom thinking: "The man who will get this job has 37 cents in his pocket." a belief you have for good reason... unknown to you, you ALSO happen to have 37 cents in your pocket, so your belief is true... but you do not KNOW that it is true.

 

Is philosophy fun or what?

A Brief History of the Totality of Western Thought

Part 3 of 8: Thales through Aristotle

From now on, the Socrates we will be quoting is the one with Plato's words more in his mouth.

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Supposed Problem with Socratic method

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  • Meno says: “How are you going to inquire about it, Socrates, if you don’t know what it is? Even if you do happen to bump right into it, how are you going to know that it is the thing that you do not know?”

  • Socrates: “Do you not see how Aristic (sophistic?) the argument you are making is?” “you are saying no man can inquire about what he knows and he has no ability to inquire about what he does not know.”

  • Then Socrates does something that is very strange, he appeals to priests and such who make it their concern to give an account of their practices; the human soul is immortal, it comes to an end but it comes back into existence and never really stops existing; since it has seen all things there is nothing it has not learned; so it is not surprising that it could recollect something (which men call learning that thing) that he has already known in some other context.”

 

Note the religious garb of this doctrine. Without forgetting that; let’s get to the epistemological heart of this doctrine.

 

Meno doubts it is true, so Plato has Socrates set out to prove it to him. With the slave boy.

 

We already have all the knowledge we seek, we just need to remember it, that’s what “learning” is.

 

The right way to teach, lead with questions.

 

Plato is a rationalist and makes the case for a priori knowledge here. (he’s a Parmenidean, of sorts.)

 

Go one step further: Plato’s solution to the problem of ignorant inquiry is the right one in one way, but he doesn’t clearly see it.

  • The whole message of Socrates is that you don’t need dogma, you got a method.

  • The unexamined life is not worth living.

  • Epistemic humility, that is the lesson of Socrates. Be open to revision.

  • Plato endorses some of these views of Socrates while modifying or dropping others.

    • Plato wants to give us positive propositions to affirm not just always going around and proving we don't know anything.

 

Plato sees that some of these claims beg for a more meta-epistemological justification.

  • We can’t just assume moral realism, and Plato saw this as something he had to argue. He has to ground out that assumption, show it is right.

  • To do this would require us to head off into questions of “what we can know and how we can know” and “what there is” (epistemology and metaphysics)

  • Epistemologically,

    • what we need is “how we come to have and justify the knowledge we do have?” and

  • metaphysically:

    • “What is there in the world and how to we account for what there is?”

 

Moral truths are grounded in reality, moral truths are out there just like scientific truths are out there, this is Plato’s view. You need in your “list of what there is” in your ontology, some room for morality. This is what Plato sees. He needs to engage in the full range of philosophical inquiry in order to justify the Socratic moral project.

 

He never loses the focus on the Socratic moral project, but he sees that you have to ground them.

 

While doing this he sees that some of Socrates’s claims are not defensible, they need adjustment or they need to be dropped. Plato always remains a Socratic, but he becomes his own philosopher, he builds on the Socratic grounding.

A Brief History of the Totality of Western Thought

Part 3 of 8: Thales through Aristotle

Let’s look at the second half of the Meno

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In the Meno, related to the Elenchus, another problem; is virtue teachable. Plato thinks this phenomenon needs explanation.

 

How could Socrates spend his whole life not making progress on these questions he’s dedicated himself to? The most wise man failed to answer the most basic questions regarding virtue. What must virtue have to be like for that to be the case. The Meno comes to answer this question as well. The second half of the Meno can be thought of as Plato seeing problems with the Socratic method and coming to address them. If virtue could be passed from father to son, then Themistocles and Paraclese would surely have passed their knowledge on to their sons, and Socrates would have found SOMEONE who could answer his questions relating to the nature of virtue. But this is not the case; it seems you cannot pass knowledge on or down.

 

Knowledge of virtue must not be like Horsemanship in at least this way.

 

Socrates uses the image of “virtue as a craft” throughout the dialogues; and we can understand why that might be tempting, because it is practical and can teach you how to live in the world, and it is the kind of thing that can be passed down like craft knowledge, but it must not be like those things.

 

An alternative to saying virtue is knowledge is to say that it is true opinion.

 

True opinion is as valuable as knowledge if it is reliable.

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Dedalus's sculptures are so realistic, if you don’t tie them down they will get up and run away.

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You tie down your true opinions with reasons and you have knowledge instead.

He has a true belief stirred up like a dream by Socrates’s questioning, the slave boy does have; but not real knowledge of geometry yet unless he was asked more questions in various ways, his knowledge would be as accurate as anyone’s if they keep it up; this is tying down his true beliefs.

The Meno ends in perplexity as well, maybe the only reason i can hang on to true opinions is a divine gift.

We still have not investigated what virtue is, we still have not answered the question (this is how it ends).

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Phaedo

 

Plato’s first attempt at a metaphysics.

 

If it is fully developed, it would help ground Socratic Moral theory.

 

All of Plato’s dialogues can be read on multiple levels.

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The theme on it’s face, Meno: “Virtue”; but it can be read as a doctrine of education; maybe a crude epistemological or metaphysical doctrine is detectible.

 

The Soul, is the main focus of the Phaedo. Lots of arguments for the immortality of the soul. An intro to the Platonic theory of forms, is also in there, and that will build throughout it; each development of the immortality argument also develops that notion. We will also see other things going on as well.

Phaedo is set in prison on the day that Socrates is to be put to death.

 

Theme of purification in the dialogue (not just in why you have to wait for the ships to come back before the execution); Pythagorean theme runs through it (strongest condemnation of the body, harmony as well). It’s a strange dialogue structurally, it is a dialogue within a dialogue within a dialogues. Plato recounting Crito and Echecrates talking about Socrates on his death. Plato says he was not there. We will have to think about why Plato did that. He distances himself historically from the dialogue by talking about him not being there.

 

The immortality of the soul; what does the text mean by “soul”?

 

Plato thinks of it as the principle of “life”. It is what brings life to a body. But it is also identified with the MIND and specifically the rational part of the mind. (this will change in the Republic, so it seems a Socratic view as opposed to platonic one). Appetites are a part of the body, reason a part of the mind; this is the way it is conceived.

 

What does he mean by the immortality of the “soul” if the soul is your reasoning function. He doesn’t always distinguish between soul as an individual stuff and as a mass thing, so it’s not clear if he means one universal world soul or each person’s in particular one.

 

It is not clearly defined here, the soul.

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Hiking Trail

The last thing to know before diving into the text

 

“Plato doing philosophy, not presenting his philosophy.” why do we look at the bad arguments? He gives clear indications he knows they are bad arguments. This might change our relation to the text in an important way interpretively. These works were written as texts for his school, most likely. We are supposed to be reading them as students, like a workbook for us to engage with.

 

This is an homage to Socrates who believes that philosophy can only be done one-on-one between people; he leaves questions open to the students to answer without Socrates's answer even though the Socratic answer should be determinable by the previous text.

A Brief History of the Totality of Western Thought

Part 3 of 8: Thales through Aristotle

Doing philosophy is preparation for death. (definition of philosophy)

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115E: “I want to make my argument before you as to why a man who has done philosophy is ripe to be cheerful in facing death… the one main aim of those who practice philosophy is preparing to die and death, they must be eager for it. You made me laugh, Socrates, even though I was in no mood to laugh; the majority of man… deserve to be.” Philosopher’s are already dead to the world, as a joke; in Socrates' sense it’s only a little different from that; we think of death as when the soul separates from the body, and what the philosopher is concerned with is the good of the soul and not the good of the body.”

 

65A: “such things … frees the soul from the association of the body in as much as possible… the man who does not care for the pleasures of the body. is the body an obstacle? Even the poets agree we know nothing through our sight or hearing… the senses keep us from acquiring knowledge… when then does the soul grasp the truth, whenever it attempts to grasp anything by the body it is deceived by it, it is in reasoning when we approach truth without the body inflicting the soul… when you are totally dissociated from the body and just using the mind, that’s when you have a chance.”

 

Pure thought alone freed from eyes and ears and the whole body for the body confuses the soul.

 

There is an implied criticism of Socrates here, he looked in the wrong place, talking with embodied people; he should have relied on reason alone.

 

This is Parmenedian; reason alone. Sense is a burden or an obstacle to discovering the truth.

This is a battle between two worlds, the world of sensible particulars and the INTELLIGIBLE world.

 

Plato is taking Socrates’ “definitions” which all instances of justice have in common which make them just and saying IT IS A REAL THING a FORM in existence.

 

From 65 up to 70, we have to purify ourselves.

 

Just before 70A: “Cebes intervened, everything else you said is excellent, but men find it hard to believe what you said about the soul; men believe that the soul dissolves with the body.”

 

“Babbling poet” he was looking for the archetypes through reason, he had no interest in the poets and what they had to say.

 

If something comes to be X it comes to be X from coming to be the opposite of X; if something comes to be X it must be able to become not X again or else everything would be X.

 

Contradictory opposites: nothing can have both of, AND everything has one or the other.

 

Red or not red. (if something comes to be red, it must have been not red before it came to be red...)

 

Contrary opposites: nothing can have both at the same time BUT not everything has one or the other.

 

Tall or short. (some things are middling)

 

It’s like this, Plato thinks, The fact that the people questioned by Socrates CAN give the right answers means that they already know it.

 

Then he gives us the conditions for Platonic recollection

 

Recollection Argument - Phaedo 72d-76d

Conditions for (normal cases of) recollection

  1. Must have known the thing recollected before

  2. Something perceived puts me ‘in mind’ of something else

    1. E.g., seeing Simmias’ coat puts me in mind of Simmias.

  3. Recollection can be spurred by perceiving things similar to the thing recollected or things dissimilar.

    1. E.g., dissimilar - Simmias: Simmias’ coat similar - Simmias: a photo of Simmias

  4. In cases of recollection from similars one must think that the thing is lacking in its similarity to what one is reminded of - that is ‘falls short’ of the thing recollected.

 

Recollection Argument Sketch:

  1. We have knowledge of the equal itself

  2. Knowledge of the equal itself is not given in perception

  3. If such knowledge cannot be gained through perception then it cannot be gained in this world.

  4. Therefore, it must be acquired in another world before we were born into this one.

 

We see approximations of circles, and we recognize that they are close to the ideal circle; but all we have ever engaged with are approximations of circles, so we could not have acquired our knowledge of the ideal circle from our experiences in this world, but we have that knowledge; so we must have acquired it in another world.

 

74a5: “When the recollection is caused by similar thing, necessarily the similarity must be recognized as deficient. Consider, there is something that is equal beyond all the particular equalities we find in the world; do we know what equality itself is? Yes we do. Where did we get this knowledge of “equality itself”? It is not from our individual experiences of judging the equality of things. We recollect equality to be a concept when we are looking at specific instances of things which to one degree or another are equal to one another. The equal things and equality itself are two very different things…

Red Wall & Stairs

Skip to the symposium, for a moment: 211a: Socrates’s speech on the “nature of love” which he puts into the mouth of a wise woman; she gives this idea that there is a hierarchy, true love is love itself, we come to know that by working our way up through abstractions. I start by loving a thing, then a person, then all persons, then all living things, what I’m really looking for is LOVE ITSELF. And what is that? It always is, and neither comes to be nor passes away, it is not beautiful this way and ugly that way or in relation to one thing or here or there or to one or not another… it is not relative in any way; it is just beautiful and lovely all the time because it is loveliness itself. It does not appear as one idea or one kind of knowledge, not anywhere as in a thing or an animal, but it is itself by itself in itself; and the other things share in that.

 

These things are two-faced: the sensible particulars. Heraclitus and Zeno.

 

Parmenadean is the idea of the one before.

 

Back to the phaedo: 74: Equal stones and sticks sometimes while remaining the same appear to be equal in one way but unequal in another. But it is definitely from the equal things that we are reminded of equality. That’s how you have derived and grasped the notion of equality. So long as it is similar or dissimilar, this is recollection; you REMEMBER equality as a concept.

 

How could I possibly come up with the idea of equality itself by observing things that are no more equal then they are unequal? How could I possibly have come up with the concept of beauty by observing things that are no more beautiful than they are ugly. (all the things are relative).

 

One way is to push away all the ugly stuff from the beautiful stuff so I abstract out the stuff that isn’t right. But how do I know what to do with that unless I already have the concept of equality in my mind; the beautiful in my mind.

 

The one who thinks this must have prior knowledge to know how to sort out the beautiful from the ugly, the equal from the unequal.

 

All learning depends on my already having a concept of similarity. Maybe this is the only necessary preexisting concept.

 

He is making an argument for innate or a priori knowledge; he does this by saying I HAD the experience necessary to learn this in another world. (so it isn't ultimately a priori, is it?)

 

I’m not sure the “scientific hardwiring” explanation for how we have innate ideas is so different from the mystical religious one.

ALSO: could we not say something about our "ideas before conscious ideas" ideas effecting the shaping of the minds which are now thinking about those ideas? from our first two lectures? Is Plato really saying anything different? -- Just a thought.

 

It shows that something is immortal, at least, and that is “that which knows”, at least.

 

It has to “be acquired in another world before we were born in this one” is a way of saying “it has to be acquired not in the particular life of mine but in something larger than that.”

 

This is funny. It’s like an argument for a priori knowledge which requires the idea that you have interacted with it before because that’s the only way to know something. It’s immediate or direct interaction through the “mind’s eye”; “reason” is what grasps the thing.

 

When you die your reason itself goes off and interacts directly with the real truths behind everything. That’s where it came from, anyway; this argument really only proves the pre-existence of the soul.

 

We are starting to get the forms. The ontological units that are purely true and only accessible through the use of reason.

 

76e: “if those realities we talk about exist, and we measure all our perceptions against it, just as they exist, so our soul must exist before we are born, if the pre-existing soul exists the forms exist, if the forms exist the pre-existing soul exists… Simmias, ‘I do not think myself it has been proven that the soul continues to exist after death. Further proof is needed.’ combine it with the cyclical argument; they aren’t happy about that. Socrates ‘you seem to have this childish fear, you are afraid. Assume we are, make a case for us.’ sing them a song like a spell till they are calmed.”

 

The Affinity Argument (78b-80c)

  1. Suppose the soul ceases to exist

  2. For any x, if x ceases to exist, then it is a complex thing that has been decomposed.

  3. The forms are simple, and hence not subject to decomposition.

  4. The soul resembles the forms in many respects, and in investigating the forms actually passes into its realm.

  5. So, the soul resembles the forms with respect to their simplicity.

  6. So, the soul cannot be decomposed.

  7. So, the soul cannot cease to exist.

 

Simmias and Cebes respond to this argument with objection after objection.

 

84c: “if it is invisible, does that mean it is indisoluble?”

 

Maybe we should think of the soul as a “harmony” instead of as a singularity.

 

A harmony is an invisible thing which is made of parts, Socrates.

 

Cebes: “does it follow that if a thing is more stable and rules over something else, that it is imperishable?”

 

The soul is analogous to the owner of a cloak.

 

The owner is more stable, and rules over the cloaks, but he is not imperishable.

Argument against Simmias’ idea that the soul is a harmony.

 

91C: we must proceed, and first remind me, cebes is more inclined to say the soul is more than the body...does the soul have many bodies and then die, or does it die before the body or with the body…

 

Harmonies can’t be seen, but they are dependent on the instruments which produce them.

 

What does he mean by harmony here? It’s not a melody and its not a chord, it’s not the notes either, the harmony lasts for as long as the instrument lasts. So it is most natural to read “harmony” as a “state of attunement”. The soul is a ratio of relations of the part of the body like the attunement of an instrument is a product of the ratios and relations of the parts of the instrument.

 

When the instrument is taken apart, the attunement is lost as well; the soul is like that with the body, Simmias is saying. (This has Pathagorean roots, but it is not a popular theory of the soul at the time; however, this is how they used to talk about “health”.)

 

Materialist worldview here.

 

Materialism is incompatible with the recollection argument, and it is incompatible with the theory of forms; so we have to choose between them. Is it?

 

Then he puts a straightforward argument out there, that’s this one:

  1. Every soul is an attunement

  2. No soul is more a soul than any other

  3. Therefore, No soul is more an attunement than any other

  4. Therefore, No soul is more in tune than any other.

 

This is a bad argument. He is saying that the 4th line is absurd, so we must reject the first which led us there. But the 4th doesn’t really follow from the third.

 

This argument doesn’t work, but no one notices, but he gives another argument.

The soul is in opposition to and ruling over the body, but the attunement can’t be in opposition to and rule over the parts of the instrument.

 

Plato is the first to hold that “reasoning” (our mental activities) are the least bodily of our activities. Thinking, higher order cognition, is insufficiently explained on materialist terminology. He is the first dualist, in this sense. But these arguments are not really that good against materialism; he has others.

 

Let’s move on from Simias to Cebes.

 

Cebes says maybe the soul outlives SOME bodies, but not all and not forever.

 

Socrates paused in thought for a long time, and then said that generation and destruction are what we have to think about to examine his views.

 

The pre-Socratics were all materialists, that’s important to understanding this passage.

 

Plato is going to argue that materialist arguments are always insufficient, that they always fall short. He refers to Anaxagoras. “When I read Ana, I finally thought someone was speaking the truth, there’s all this stuff, but it’s all directed by mind, he says. But then he goes on to give materialistic explanations for everything. What would an actual appeal to mind for everything be? It would be an appeal to the idea that “everything is for the best.”

 

Socrates says that’s what we need, a teleological explanation for everything. A purely physiological explanation for why Socrates is sitting in prison is not satisfying. (he sits because bones give structure and tissues hold together and bend the limbs…) (what would be better would be to say: “because the Athenians had thought it right to condemn me, I thought it right not to run away.)

 

You can’t explain why he is sitting there from a physical explanation, you have to refer to his mental states and figure out why he thought it best to stay there.

 

The physical explanations are necessary, perhaps, but they are not sufficient.

Aristotle believed that there were four different kinds of “why” questions.

  1. Material causes

  2. Efficient Causes

  3. Formal Causes

  4. Final Causes (final=telos; teleological)

 

Aitia means “to be responsible for” and is a legal term, and that’s the term we are translating as “teleological”.

 

Why based on the material structure; why did it come to be, why is it organized the way it is; and what is its purpose for being… these are the four “why” questions.

 

Aristotle thought that the material cause answered the question “what is this thing made of?”.

 

Why the statue? Bronze.

 

The answer to the efficient why question is “the art of sculpture” or “the sculptor”.

 

The answer to the formal why is “it is of Zeus.”

 

The final why is: “that for the sake of which” it exists. The statue is there to teach us of our orientation in the world; or for the sake of portraying Zeus; or for beauty; or for the sake of teaching us what is true of the world…. Or whatever.”

 

The material and the efficient isn’t enough.

 

We need the formal and the final causes to understand something.

 

Aristotle says that nobody has formal causes until Plato. Then he says that he is the one to invent the final cause. (but Plato is kind of dealing with that already).

 

They are saying that the material is insufficient to explain.

They are looking for an explanation for why this is the best of all possible worlds. Leibnitz wanted that. Plato gave up on it and settled for a second best theory of causality. Nietzsche's philosophical project was to make a grand yes-saying to all things. Still a kind of search for the Arche here.

 

Plato says through soc; 99D5: “when I weary of investigating things I must avoid the problem those who look at an eclipse.. I might be blinded if I looked at them with my eyes, I should have to use words instead (but this is an analogy, he says); I started in this manner: “taking as my hypothesis in each case I would consider as true, and as untrue whatever did not agree, what I mean is that I never stop talking about the kind of cause with which I have concerned myself, I turn back, I assume the existence of a beautiful and a great and so on… If you agree with me on these then you will see that all the rest follows, including the immortality of the soul. Consider then, if you share my opinion of what follows, is there anything beautiful besides the beautiful itself, it is beautiful insofar as it shares in with the beautiful; the same is with all other things. To say that something is beautiful because of color or shape or whatever, these things confuse me; I say it is that it shares in a relationship with the beautiful. I stick to this and I never fall into error; namely that it is through beauty that beautiful things are made beautiful.”

 

Grasping the form of the beauty itself would answer all the questions you might have of particular beautiful things. The only thing they all have in common is “beauty”. Courageous things are courageous because they partake in the form of courage. Good things are good because they partake in the form of The Good.

 

Now I can take that first answer, and offer a more subtle one. Somethings always participate in the SAME FORM, ALWAYS.

 

Why are hot things hot, they participate in the form of heat. But fire is ALWAYS hot, so another way of explaining why hot things are hot is that they have “fire” in them, and fire always participates in the form of hot. Why are cold things cold? Because they participate in the form of cold, BUT ALSO I can use the explanation that they have the presence of ice, which always participate in the form of cold.

He’s given up on giving a teleological explanation, he has a formal one, and a materialist one.

 

Final Argument:

  1. Soul brings (as the cause of) life to the body. It is both necessary and sufficient for a body to be alive.

  2. In order to pass on a property a thing must have the property it passes on.

  3. Thus, the soul itself must be (is essentially) alive.

  4. Therefore, a soul cannot die.

  5. Therefore, the soul is immortal.

 

The soul is that which always participates with the form of life. Like fire is that which always participates with the form of hotness.

If the soul brings life to the body, it has to be alive, and it is itself livingness or life.

 

The problem is that to say that fire is always hot, is to say that fire is essentially hot; ice is cold so long as it is ice, and it is ice so long as it is cold; so say that it has that property so long as it exists, is not to say that it has that property forever.

 

It’s about introducing a world-view. The forms. The arguments for the immortality of the soul is the excuse to keep introducing that.

 

What things are there forms for? Well, the moral things Socrates sought definitions for.

 

The final causes are INVENTED by thinking things. There are many of them, and there would be none if it were not for purposing creatures to give them to the entities.

 

We should figure out why Plato thinks we need forms, and then we might be able to figure out what things need forms and what don’t.

 

We need forms for things which can be two-faced. BUT there is another answer for why he wants forms: We need forms because things in the sensible world are constantly changing. If the first need is the reason for them we don’t need them for everything; if the second one is the one that motivates us we need a form for everything. Both appear, it’s not clear which matters more to Plato.

Nietzsche once said: Christianity was Plato for the masses. We are going to look at the medieval soon enough. But there are a lot of ideas in Plato here which are already predicting Christian philosophical thought. The should cannot decompose because it is simple (has no parts) the God of the philosophers in the future is simple he has no left or right, this is not only a feature of Catholic philosophy, it is a CORE part of Descartes's (the guy who tried to turn over all of what came from Aristotle onward) arguments as well. If the idea isn't simple it isn't other-worldly, and therefore it's origin need not be ultimately the Divine. Descartes may have hated Aristotle and the scholastics, but he is still a footnote to Plato!​

Plato is now divorcing himself from Socrates, he is using Socrates as his mouthpiece. Book 1 of the Republic is ODD compared to the other 9 books. It stands out in form and argument and many other ways from the rest of it.

 

The first book might have been written as a stand-alone dialogue; maybe to be titled “Thrasymachus”. And then the rest was “tacked on to” it. But this would not have been done by Plato unless there was a REASON for him doing so.

 

Ways in which book 1 is different:

  1. The first book is aporetic--We don’t get an answer to the question we started by asking.

  2. It is a clear example of the Elenchic Method; this disappears in the rest of the 9 books.--Here we have Socrates putting forward positive arguments in the rest of the books.

  3. There are ideas (like virtue being a “craft”) in book 1 but not in the others.--Craft is part and parcel of virtue being a knowledge.

 

The best suggestion of what is going on here is that Plato is DISTANCING HIMSELF from the Socratic method.

He even puts a bunch of BAD ARGUMENTS in Socrates’ mouth, and this happens right when we desperately want the method to work, but it doesn’t.

 

The Elenchic Method requires that there are honest answers elicited from the interlocutors, but Thrasymachus simply withdraws from the argument; and so the elenchus is not working. Plato is acknowledging the limitations of the elenchic method.

 

He’s then going to give up the “virtue is knowledge” thesis; knowledge is still central, but not equivalent to virtue.

  • It’s still going to be a defense of the idea of moral knowledge

  • And the idea that we need to grasp the essence of justice and courage, the form

  • And that having access to that kind of knowledge is necessary to having virtue even if it is not sufficient

  • And what we will get by the end is a metaphysic capable of supporting those claims.

 

We don’t even have the opening passage of the Republic, but we like reading it (we do have it, not in one book) and the whole thing is masterfully foreshadowed in the first few lines.

Bendis (Artemis) (this is the goddess that they are celebrating in the ceremony--she’s a Thracian goddess). Everyone in Athens is worshiping gods other than those of the state of Athens… pointing out the hypocrisy of everyone who sentenced Socrates to death (remember one of the charges was: Denying the official gods of the state and supplanting them with his own).

 

There was this movie where Socrates goes to the mall (bill and ted’s excellent adventure), the Piraeus is the port of Athens, this is where merchants do their business, where they buy and sell stuff, the economic center of Athens. The opening line of the republic: “We went down to the Piraeus” this is the phrase that Odysseus uses to describe his descent into hell “we went down to”. Now remember the context of the prologue of Zarathustra... the "going down" principle is deep and old. We talked about Plato from the start of our lectures on Zarathustra.

 

Thrasymachus (an actual sophist)

 

Glaucon and Adeimantus (these are literally Plato’s brothers)

 

Book 1: the view that “justice is the advantage of the stronger” is put forward. Much of this book is devoted to Socrates trying to get Thrasymachus to clarify this view. The argument for it is something like: “The idea of justice, of behaving justly, morally; is serving the interest not of those who behave that way, but those who are stronger and can impose these ideas on them.”

 

Thrasymachus says Socrates is naïve to think that statesmen, the good ones, care about the good of the subjects and not their own good. The stronger are the rulers and they impose “proper behavior” on their subjects to advance THEMSELVES, Thrasymachus says.

​

But, your soul!, Socrates, says Thrasymachus, withdraws from the conversation.

 

Book 2: Do you want to seem to have persuaded us, or do you want to really persuade us?

 

Glaucon’s challenge.

 

“Only those are just who are too weak to be unjust.”

Ring of Gyges (In comments linked here)

  • Used as a way of setting up the most difficult version of the task before us.

  • The project is a serious one, and we do not want to be too easily satisfied before we have actually accomplished it.

  • We are asking about how we should live, after all.

 

Socrates proposes looking at the concept of Justice from more than one analytical framework.

 

Locate Justice in the Kallipolis. (The big city)

  • Kallipolis is supposed to be a meritocracy

  • Use a fictional version, and idealized picture of a perfectly harmonious city

  • We will build it from the ground up arguing over every detail of what would make for the best city.

    • Everybody doing what they do best.

    • How do we figure out what everyone does best.

  • Then we can look in that city for what is called "Justice" in the city.

    • Once we have identified "Justice" on the large scale, we can then turn our attention back to individual man and see if we cannot answer the question of what "justice" is to us.

They agree to this project.

 

Plato puts forward some fairly radical solutions to how to compose the state.

  • Three classes: Workers/Producers; Auxiliaries/Soldiers; and Guardians/Rulers.

  • Let’s fix the educational system first.

  • The underlying principle is that no thing can have contradictory properties; so when there is a conflict in a single person, there are PARTS of the person. “Parts” is used liberally; it could be faculties instead of just locals.

 

Three waves:

  • Women and men will undertake the same educational process.

  • There will be a community composed of women and children; we will remove children from the homes at a young age.

  • Glaucon 473: is the Kallipolis actually possible, and if so, how might we bring it about?

    • “If we discover the nature of justice, should we also expect the just man to perfectly instantiate it, or will we be satisfied if he just does the best job possible?” So, we need a model of what the perfectly just man would be like, and a model of the most unjust man; so that we could be MOST LIKE the just man; but this does not mean that it is possible for this most just man to exist.

    • Next, we should try to discover what is badly done in cities which could with the smallest change, and the fewest in number possible and least extensive in effect which could make them more like our perfect city.

    • There is one change we could point to, it is not small or easy, but it is possible. The greatest wave, the third wave, for outright ridicule and contempt.

      • Until philosophers rule as kings in their cities… no rest from evil.

 

The philosophers love the beauty itself or the justice itself,

Then there are lovers of sights and sounds (the dilettantes) who love particular beautiful things or just things.

 

The Argument from Opposites:

  1. Knowledge is of something which is, (Parmenides) I cannot know what is not

  2. What fully is is fully knowable, and what is not is completely unknowable.

  3. If something is and is not then it lies intermediate between what fully is and what is not

  4. Therefore, it lies between the knowable and the unknowable. (opinions)

  5. The different faculties are distinguished by being directed towards different objects

  6. So what is known is the object of a different faculty than what is believed.

  7. The many beautiful, just, and holy things, also appear to be not-beautiful, unjust, and unholy; that is, they both are and are not what one says them to be.

  8. Therefore, sensible particulars are the objects of belief.

  9. Thus, sight-lovers are lovers of the many particulars, have only beliefs or opinions about what is beautiful and just. Philosophers who care about knowledge, care about the one-over-many, knowledge itself, beauty itself, justice itself.

 

We can only get our kind of knowledge if we do not rely on sensations.

Conclusion: we cannot know what justice is through sensation.

What Plato is doing here is diagnosing where Socrates went wrong because Socrates looked for an answer to his metaphysical questions in the empirical world.

 

If this is right, knowledge has to be of something other than sensible particulars. It is in some way out of the flux of the sensible world. If TRUTH is unchanging and KNOWLEDGE is its faculty, then the sensible world (which is always yin in yang and yang in yin) and OPINION is the faculty of that; then the philosopher is engaged in something qualitatively different from what the sense-lover is.

 

There are sensible particulars: Objects of opinion; between being and nothing-becoming, multiform, visible, composite, mutable, in space and temporal.

 

Forms: immutable, incomposite, outside space and time, they don't come into being, they are not multiform.

 

Plato thinks we know things, and so there must be forms, because we can’t get anything but opinions from sensible particulars.

He is either saying:

  • “We know things, so there must be forms”

  • “Because the project of trying to come to truth is not pointless, there must be forms which underpin the possibility of knowledge.”

 

Or something else. It’s important because Socrates’ lifelong project was to demonstrate that we have no knowledge, but here Plato is saying we can use our knowledge as an excuse which drives us to the positing of forms.

 

Is there something that it is to be just even if everything in the universe that actually is is unjust. What does the term, X, refer to? It refers to a “form” something which exists outside of the sensible world and which does not depend on this world existing to instantiate it. (this is the one over the many arguments in a way) he is a REALIST when it comes to abstract terms and universals.

 

The forms, in this guise, provide answers to the questions: “What is X?” It is the form of X. What is Piety? It is the form of Piety. What is Courage? It is the form of courageousness. Anything that partakes of that or imitates that is thereby courageous in part.

 

There’s an element of “revelation” involved in being able to grasp the forms, and you have to prepare your mind and your soul through education just to get there.

In the Medieval Section of this series, we will see that the "forms" become "ideas in the mind of God" or something like personality traits of God's character.

 

Another argument for forms: Aristotle says that Plato said: “If nothing in the world is stable, than nothing in the world is knowable.” in a (thought to be) late dialogue: “Since only forms are stable, only forms are knowable.” We can have beliefs about sensible particulars, but we cannot have knowledge about them.

 

He could be a Cratyean who says that you can’t step in the same river twice. If that’s true, then nothing is knowable. But it isn’t clear that Plato is a Cratylean in this strong sense. (Even if he was a Heraclitean?).

 

The fact that things change makes them unsuitable for practical knowledge.

 

Another argument, argument from opposites: At least some particulars are two-faced. They admit of composite opposites (opposites present at the same time).

 

Forms as causes: it is the form of beauty that makes things beautiful.

 

They serve as the objects of love.

When we talk about causes, we talk about Aristotelian causes:

  • Material Cause -- stone out of which a statue might be made

    • Clearly the platonic forms are not the STUFF out of which things are made.

  • Efficient Cause -- the sculptor of the statue.

    • Most scholars thing that Plato’s forms are not efficient causes

    • I had a teacher who thought they were, but I never found out from him why.

  • Formal Causes -- stone in the shape of Goliath.

    • Clearly the forms are formal causes, they tell us that they are in this form and so they are this thing.

  • Final Causes -- Why the statue exists.

    • Disputable

    • Beautiful things are striving to be like the form of beauty. Most scholars will agree that Plato’s forms would play this role as well as the formal causes role.

Forms are paradigms.

 

They are perfect examples of things. The best example of something.

 

The form of beauty is the most beautiful thing. It is WHAT IT IS to be beautiful. It exemplifies beauty.

 

This raises a question: Are forms self-predicable? This is a difficult problem.

 

The forms are objects of knowledge.

 

They are separate from the sensible world.

 

Christ is there precisely to overcome the gap between the transcendent and the sensible.

 

Meaning, Plato says, bleeds into the world because of the insensible forms. Socrates thought the sensible world could all just pass away for all he cared.

 

What we know when we know our forms (which is made possible by the forms having the kind of nature, which allows them to serve as objects of knowledge--stable, etc.) what exists are forms, and their copies or their images or their shadows. Forms are the paradigm of being, as well as knowing. Particulars don’t fully exist. The only things that are really real are forms. The others are just becomings. The particular sensibles are in a degree of being.

 

Depending on the argument you rely on you end up with a different number of forms. You might have to have one for every abstract concept. If you rely on flux, you will need very many. But if you rely on opposites, you will have fewer.

 

Most of the time he talks about the moral forms, but he does bring up the ‘form of bed’ kind of thing, and it’s not clear what the range of forms was for Plato.

That’s not the end of the story. It’s not enough. Remember the Phaedo? He wants to have an explanation of not just the form, but of why the forms were ordered for the best, why the Universe was ordered for the best. He settles for X is Y because it participates in the form of Yness; because he doesn't see how to give this broader explanation. Here in the Republic he relents, and says that the best or highest form of knowledge is the FORM OF THE GOOD and this form is distinct from other forms and above all other forms. (the way that the forms are above the particulars?)

 

Pushed to talk about it by Glaucon which he says he is NOT capable of talking about, but he gives three allegories.

 

The_Sun

 

The_Divided_Line

 

The_Cave

Plato’s introduction to the “form of the good”

 

Everything is ordered in accordance with mind. But Anaxagoras never shows this and only deals with material causes. In the Fido Plato wanted the best explanation of the cause of why everything is the way it is as it being in accordance with the mind.

 

He’s not just interested in explaining why things are ordered, but why they are ordered for the best. Why this is the best of all possible worlds.

 

He balks at the idea of being able to explain this clearly and resorts to three stories, three analogies in order to suggest that all is designed in accordance with the good.

 

The division between the world of appearances, and the intelligible world. This is standard, but the way in which things are further divided changes according to the analogy.

 

530

 

This transitions into the divided line analogy, which further unpacks this distinction which was introduced regarding the sun analogy; we now have subcategories. Within the world of appearances, we have epistemological states that go along with the objects of the mind here.

 

The good is off the chart, it is above the chart.

 

Forms are what are above that, and it is the oasis, this is intelligence or knowledge.

 

Mathematical objects; not quite forms. The kind of thinking we use when thinking about mathematics. Abstract thinking, is thinking called here.

 

Things and belief go together

 

We only have opinions or beliefs about sensible things.

 

Images, like reflections in water; further removed from what is real. Imagination is the mental state here.

 

http://www.john-uebersax.com/plato/dividedline.jpg

 

Then we have the cave.

Plato through Our Lenses and in Our Version of the Story

​

  • Exponentially increasing questionability

  • Development of rules of thought

  • Adherence of propositional analytical program and denial of experiential subjective (and exceptions to this rule)

  • Revolutions as dissolutions of previous crises that threaten to make the continuation of the game impossible

  • All philosophers as members of one of two psychological camps, and few as attempted synthesizers of these inclinations

  • Where does Nietzsche fit in this conversation along the way

  • LIST of works LINKED in the lecture, worth reading to understand this philosopher

  • Exploration of 1 to 3 significant ideas or arguments developed by each philosopher

  • This is the place to converse about this philosopher in the comments; read the works and the notes and give arguments and questions and appeals for clarification and all that here

  • Bullet-points of take-away points from this philosopher

39344856635_de15781212_b.jpg

It is difficult to add to the questionability of things when you are following Socrates. That's all he ever did (unless this was just Irony, we see he has a lot of wisdom, even if he claims to have no knowledge).

 

But Plato starts asking different questions. Not: How can we know that we do not know anything? But, rather: How can we actually know something? (epistemology)

 

Is it enough for the thing to be true? Don't we also have to believe it? What if we believe it for no good reason, in other words, if we cannot justify why we believe it, is it still knowledge?

 

What would have to be true of the world, what sort of a cosmology would we have to accept in order to live in a world where we can believe ourselves to have knowledge?

 

Plato gives us the Justified True Belief definition of "knowledge".

 

What is the world beyond the world? (metaphysics)

 

He is not just asking about the difference between the "world as it appears" and the "world as it really is" he is taking the "world as it really is" and saying that that is not real enough; there must be a world beyond that (The forms which are the "one-over-the-many" which Socrates was always pursuing).

 

With Thales we had the first idea that the cosmic universe, or the divine, or whatever could be pursued propositionally as "The Arche".

 

But there were very few questions needed to stop one from getting to that kind of knowledge, just a few questions and one can see that "all is water"

 

A bit more abstraction from Anaximander: The Principle of sufficient reason helps us to understand that the Arche is the infinite, the unbounded, the universe as a whole (see last paragraph of Will to Power by Nietzsche to see that he is engaging with these ideas and offering his description of a bounded whole that has a loop of eternally significant ring of time to solve this).

 

Regressively, Anaximenes: It wasn't water, but air that is all there is; here's some physical processes by which it condenses and rarifies to give us all the seeming variety of the world.

 

From here we can see a dichotomy of thinkers studying under the revolutionary shadow of Thales... one moving toward the physical and objective, one toward the idealistic and contemplative/subjective.

 

The conversation ping-pongs between these camps getting more extreme and more intense until we have a new revolutionary reframer: Socrates (Plato)

 

What does he do? He takes mystical artistic concepts of a religious tone to tie back together the progress we are trying to make propositionally with a solution to the inherent impossibility of that project sewn into the approaches taken so far which impossibility is demonstrated by the crisis of the conversation.

 

The "afterlife" is not a place where you remember propositions. You don't know about your specific life or memories or anything, it is all erased from you... only your character is left for you to use to pick a new life to start again with... moving towards Nirvana or away from it depending on how well you did philosophy, came close to truth in a propositional sense in a way that affected and grew your soul, while you were alive.

 

Plato values the infinite, the eternal, the immortal... so he loves the soul and the truth and sees them as something which lasts in a way the body does not. (we can see the foreshadowing of Christianity, and Paul's description of "two men" the "spirit man" and the "sinful man"... and the war between them with the body representing the base and mortal and contemptible and the Spirit being the higher FORM-like view). Nietzsche said, "Christianity was Plato for the masses."

Selected Texts on Plato

 

Just read The Damn Republic and talk about it here in the comments with quotations, arguments, anything you like; I will respond to all.

 

Better yet, get yourself a nice hardcover copy mailed to you for less than 10 dollars, and have it with you and mark it up.

 

We also have to look at Parmenides to see where Aristotle comes to continue our discussion with Aristotle.

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