How to read Plato (1995)
plato-dialogues.org
plato-dialogues.org
So if Plato is misunderstood, it is because he failed to make himself clear by clearly stating that an easy way of misunderstanding him is not what he actually meant.
"most of what is good in Aristotle is Plato's, often ill digested; but if you haven't heard of Aristotle yet, you are lucky and enjoy your luck as it last, and forget about Aristotle; only be aware that even if you don't know it, Aristotle had a great influence on our way of understanding the world, and contributed to instilling in our mind the wrong notions about Plato, this picture of Plato as an idealist dreaming in a world of "ideas" or "forms" unconnected with the real world).
So the author believes that Aristotle was part right in his philosophical beliefs and part wrong, and that the parts he got wrong, Plato got right. And that the modern world follows Aristotle, and so we need Plato to correct our beliefs.
I wonder what the author's metaphysical and political beliefs are, and how they would stand up against critiques from Aristotle and also various modern philosophers if the author presented them as such in a well-organized fashion. My guess is they would fair quite poorly, and he hiding behind Plato as a way of keeping this from happening.
I think your inference is partly true, but partly not true. In some cases, of course it is the case that by not saying "this is an easy way of misunderstanding" a particular claim does lead to Plato being misunderstood. But Plato is very much unlike Aristotle or the vast majority of other philosophers in that he wrote dialogues. These dialogues are (almost entirely) fictional, but they read more like a play than a treatise. So, it's not always the case that Plato is trying to be clearly understood in terms of propositions being conveyed in language.
For example, in the dialogue the Phaedo, Socrates is talking to two Pythagoreans about life and death. They ask Socrates to make arguments supporting their quasi-religious beliefs that the soul goes on after death, which Socrates does. But he does so in a very interesting way: the sequence of arguments keep pushing them until they become uncertain about their beliefs concerned the afterlife (which they then express).
So the question is: what does Plato actually want us to take away from this sequence of arguments? It seems, at least, that he is not coming at it head-on. He is not saying you should believe proposition P. Hence my scepticism that you claim is wholly true — that Plato is misunderstood because he failed to make himself clear. I do not think it is obvious that being clear was always Plato's ultimate goal. My suspicions are that he wanted to put the readers into a position where we have to figure out what we actually think is true, and what we think about the arguments themselves. I guess what I want to say here is that making himself clear, in the sense of stating propositions, is not obviously the goal of Plato.
You are coming at this all wrong. The important question is not what Plato did and was trying to do, it is what is the truth and how can it be clearly communicated to people so they can make use of it. If Plato communicated in a way that in fact lead many of those who read him to not actually arrive at the truth, which seems to be what has happened, then it doesn't matter if he himself knew the truth and wanted people to understand it correctly.
(Oh, and by the way, the author's claim that Aristotle misunderstood Plato seems quite dubious, given that he was Plato's student for many years, and so Plato had abundant opportunities to test out his understanding and correct it if it was wrong.)
Here is a way of looking at it. Take two scenarios
1) Plato is wrong, people correctly understand him, and they are persuaded he is correct, and so live according to mistaken ideas.
2) Plato is wrong, people misinterpret him as believing ideas that are in fact true, and they themselves are persuaded of those ideas, and so live according to the truth.
Now which is the better state of affairs? Obviously the second one. So the philosophical search for truth is more important than correctly interpreting Plato. And if you are sincerely interested in finding the truth, then you should read many more philosophers than Plato, and above all try to think independently rather than slavishly following any particular philosopher.
And if after doing this you conclude that Plato's ideas are correct, what you definitely should not do is urge everyone to spend their next ten years reading Plato according to your interpretation, as veryfew will do that. What you should instead do is present Plato's ideas to the world as an organized philosophical work,complete with arguments, making occasional reference to Plato, and then see if these ideas stand up to critical examination by other philosophers. When philosophers who are Plato-enthusiasts don't follow the correct route, I assume it is because they sense, correctly, that their beliefs could not stand up to critical scrutiny, but don't want to admit it to themselves.
That is why I turned to the question of what the author thinks is true, and could it stand up to critical examination. As I said, I think he is hiding behind Plato, and it seems to me you are doing the same, turning the question away from what is the truth to your interpretation of Plato.
And with that in mind, let me ask you, what is your metaphysics and what is your political philosophy? Also, for one particular topic, namely biology, do you agree that Aristotle invented scientific biology, and that this was a great advance? Or do you claim that Plato actually invented it, or do you agree that Aristotle did but that it was invalid and unimportant, or what? Ditto formal logic.
> Also, for one particular topic, namely biology, do you agree that Aristotle invented scientific biology, and that this was a great advance?
I don't know. If I understand correctly, Aristotle said that women had fewer teeth than men. He was married twice, but apparently never bothered to open either wife's mouth and count. That may have been biology, but it wasn't very scientific.
And what if was wrong about that? Or is it your assumption that Plato was right about everything, and so therefore he must be right about that particular idea?
As to Aristotle's specific empirical claims in the realm of biology, the great majority have been confirmed by modern science.
The fact that people disagree so much as to Plato's ideas, but far less over works of straightforward exposition, would seem to indicate that, when it comes to written texts, the latter is far superior.
In fact, the dialogue boosters actually seem to believe this. I say this because when they are writing their interpretation of a dialogue, and they get to a point people disagree on, they don't write more dialogue, but rather use a series of propositions to present what they think Plato actually meant.
Beyond that, my impression with the dialogue boosters is that at least most of them are more devoted to the idea of promoting the superiority of dialogue than to rationally determining if Plato's ideas are actually correct.
No, what happens through this process is the student gets an idea in their head and thinks it is correct. The only way to check it out is for the student to state it in a prepositional form to some other smart philosophers and see if they punch any holes in it. But I guess you don't want them to do that because you sense, I would say that correctly, that many Plato's ideas couldn't stand up to that sort of critical scrutiny.
By the way, I do think Plato's dialogues are well-worth reading, it's just that I think many of his ideas were mistaken.
You’re assuming such an entity as truth exists which is a fairly platonic position...
The fact is, materialists have a different understanding of the correct meaning of the term "truth" than that. Ditto the pragmatists.
The fact that you don't seem to be aware of that indicates to me that you have a quite poor understanding of Western academic philosophy.
(This is why Phaedrus ends with Socrates arguing that you cannot learn anything by reading, only through discussion with a teacher.)
Second, he says that the dialogues should be examined as a whole. Well, how would we understand the entire corpus of dialogues without first understanding each individual dialogue on its own, and vice versa? An individual dialogue is easier to understand on its own, that's probably where we should start.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwpMRCoVgSJ-rKyV1yhWljg
Works such as the Republic are a bit too heavyweight / scholarly for me..
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/eidos/
The author is currently writing a series of articles on his reading of the Republic.
That’s why Socrates was executed, for treason really but under different charges because of an amnesty on collaborators imposed by Sparta in exchange for the restoration of democracy. And why Plato was exiled to Syracuse, where he failed to worm his way into Dyonisios’ favor with his transparent flattery.
The Spartan-inspired political system advocated by Plato in The Republic is totalitarian beyond the wildest dreams of a Hitler, Stalin or Pol Pot. It does suggest philosophers ought to be the supreme rulers, which may explain that useless profession’s fondness for the guy, and the excuses they make for him.
Far better to read Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and Its Enemies”, volume 1, “The Spell of Plato” to understand how abominable Plato’s influence has been for mankind.
I doubt that would have appealed to Hitler or Stalin.
I think your judgement is clouded by „democracy is good“ which is (a) a very modern stance and (b) one that many philosophers through the ages opposed.
Probably not. But it could appeal to many popes, and it didn't prevent many of them to be scheming manipulating power-hungry a------s. (The "may not own stuff" is not really different from "I am a CEO with no salary and a company plane.")
I just don't see a smart and reasonable person wanting to rule over other people. And even if you wanted to, I don't think there is a good strategy on how to do it.
For any benevolent enlightened dictator, I see an analogue of the classical Epicurus quote about God:
Is the ruler going against the will of the people by manipulation? Then he cannot claim to be enlightened.
Is the ruler going against the will of the people by force? Then he cannot claim to be benevolent.
Is the ruler not going against the will of the people? Then he cannot claim to be a dictator!
What Plato is describing is simply a fantasy that glosses over many real-world complications of ruling. Such as, even if you were a genius ruler, how do you select your associates and underlings? You need a system anyway, there is no way around it.
(It is also kinda similar to fallacy of Cartesian theater - if only we had a perfect component where all the decisions are made, we wouldn't have to deal with all the complicated details of how that component actually arises from more elementary things.)
So yeah, Hitler would not mind those rules.
Also, Athens were democracy for its citizens (minority of population.) They were in "democracy is good" mood, because Thirty Tyrants period mentioned above abolished democracy and killed/tortured significant percentage of citizens. It was not some kind of abstraction to them, it was "I had power to influence things and then lost it" practical concrete consideration. Athens citizens might be violent slaveholders themselves, but they sure as hell minded past violence against themselves and loss of their own freedom.
Socrates execution was miscarriage of justice, but the whole "democracy or not" was as down to earth as "no more nazi" was after WWII. It might be pure thought experiment to you, it was not to them.
What do you make of the claim that The Republic isn't about an ideal state at all but is rather an allegory for how individuals should govern themselves (ideal "soul"), with "totalitarian reason" at the helm I suppose, and that it's even stated in the book itself that this is the case?
I'm far from an scholar on Plato, but I've read a few dialogues and The Republic whole, and I never saw anything that made me think of it that way.
Many adepts, and, arguably, most of the leadership of horrible totalitarian ideologies of twentieth century have honestly believed that they're working for the benifit of the whole mankind. (In the meanwhile, western capitalist democracies, which managed to actually benifit mankind the most, were run mostly by people pursuing their own self-interest). Why don't you think that Plato have had the same idealistic devotion?
This is not starting off well. The first rule is to interpret him in the most favorable way possible... (And the second rule btw is that Plato is better than Aristotle—which incidentally also makes up most of the first rule.)
I've read some plato and been very impressed with what he was doing at his time. That said, I've run into a number of folks who insist that he is still one of the most important philosophers to read (in the sense of being capable of benefitting modern readers)—but I can never get them to say what any particular idea(s) he has that's useful or true/important but not already well known. And any ideas I came across in my own reading were either easily demonstrable to be incorrect (and which someone as intelligent as Plato never would have espoused if he lived with our modern knowledge), or I'd already run into them in other contexts.
Actually, as a principle of reading in general, this is not a bad one. It does not mean that we have to decide that the most favourable interpretation is the one correct interpretation, but it does mean that it is reasonable to search for such an interpretation in the beginning. This is called the principle of charity. The reason the author recommends it is that often people will impute a particular view to a philosopher that implies the philosopher made elementary errors in reasoning or obvious falsehoods.
This may, of course, be the case. It is trivially true that philosophers make invalid or weak inferences, and false claims.
But there are two good reasons to adhere to the principle of charity that the author does not make explicit. First, if we do not, then we often end up short-circuiting our understanding of what the philosopher may be trying to say. That is, we may prematurely dismiss the claim as absurd instead of trying to sort out what might be the actual claim. Second, while part of philosophy depends on what philosophers are actually saying, a good part of doing philosophy is figuring out what our response to a particular claim is, how we ourselves would support that claim (if the inference is invalid), and what claim we would put in its place (if the claim is false). If we do little more than dismiss a claim as absurd, then we are not really doing philosophy.
So I guess what I am saying here is that making the assumption "Plato is a smart guy" is actually not a bad start for one taking a serious study of what he has to say.
But it also seems to me that there are other ways to take this. First, the Socrates in the Republic is a character in an exchange — and so it seems not unreasonable to think that perhaps that character is not a simple mouthpiece of the author. For example, nobody would say Hamlet is Shakespeare's mouthpiece. Second, there are dialogues where Socrates gets completely trounced by his opponent — in particular, the Parmenides. Interpretations of what is going on in the Parmenides are diverse; but at the very least it seems that Socrates is not Plato's mouthpiece. Third, if (contrary to the previous two points) it turns out that Socrates is Plato's mouthpiece, but that mouthpiece is telling us that Plato will manipulate the reader as he sees fit, then it seems at least possible that the whole idea that Socrates is Plato's mouthpiece is itself not a straightforward claim. Thus, the grounds for your claim that one should be careful about applying this principle to Plato — assuming I am right that you base it on evidence in the dialogues — is not entirely solid.
As an additional point, it seems to me that even if the author wants to manipulate the reader, it still stands us in good stead to have a principle of charity. It is a starting point, not an ending point.
Agreed that there's a deliberate indirection in dialogs; that's why I included the caveat. But to take another example, the Turtle is not always Hoftstadter's mouthpiece, yet Hofstadter doesn't seem especially manipulative to me. Plato (at least in translation) does. The passage I brought up just crystallized that reaction. I started out reading Plato from the usual charitable standpoint, and ended feeling that's a mistake: whatever's he's up to, it's not primarily to help the reader become a better independent thinker, or to accurately report events.
I've read less Aristotle, but he gives a different impression: someone with faults like overconfidence, but who's honestly pitching in to the project of improving collective knowledge and thinking.
It doesn't work great with texts. Any communication is done with background idea of a receiver. If you try to prove math theorem to someone, you need to start with some assumptions about level of math literacy of those who will read/listen your proof. If your assumptions are wrong, you either will tire your readers with trivialities, or will prove them nothing, because they cannot comprehend your argument.
Authors of texts make assumptions like this. If you do not assume that their assumptions about your preparedness for topic are too high, then you have a little chance to figure it out while reading text. Reading a math text you probably will figure out that text is too high level for you. But if you read philosophy it is more probably that you find author to be a stupid one with stupid ideas.
> The important is to respect what you read and give it a chance to convince you.
It works great with interactive dialogue, but with texts you need not just give a chance, but make all the efforts the need to make to convince you, because book cannot make any efforts. The more efforts to do to prove the author to be right, the more you would get from the book. In dialogue you can expect your opponent to make all the hard work to prove his point. If your opponent is smarter than you are. If he is not, than to get maximum from dialogue you'd better help your opponent sometimes. A book is a stupid opponent, a book have ideas but lacks intelligence to defend them.
> We are conditioned to think that books and their writers and their roles and society standing are an implicit guarantee of quality or validity of their arguments.
The goal is not to prove the author right or wrong. The goal is to get maximum from reading. If you read book, assuming that the author is smarter than he really was, and you spent a long hours to prove him wrong, arguing with more intelligent ideas than stupid author really had, it means that you have invented some clever looking ideas, and then prove them wrong. That was not obviously wrong ideas: if they were you wouldn't spent hours to refute them. So you have got more wisdom from book, than the author had in his mind. It is a great outcome, isn't it?
Alternatively, if you found interpretation of text, that cleverer than author meant, and you prove this interpretation to be true, than it is even more great outcome. Does it really matters now what the author really meant by his text?
Then those are not exactly very good "philosophers" then, are they? If so, it's not right to compare them with philosophers. It would be a weak and invalid inference. A philosopher needs to be able to define the term philosophy, first of all. Let me tell you that it's not "a love of wisdom". If you define it like that then you need to be able to define love and wisdom in terms of 'what is'. Only a real master of philosophy was able to do so in history. And we only have perhaps 4-5 of them in the last ~6k years of recorded history.
Philosophy does not rack up facts in some sort of storehouse of knowledge.
Much of the value of reading Plato is that he gets you to question your own assumptions and those of others, and does so in an accessible and easy to understand way.
What is justice? What is good? What is the best way to govern? What is true? Where does knowledge come from? Why should any of this matter?
Most people without any philosophical training go around acting like they have the answers to all of these questions, or that they're self-evident, or that they don't matter.
Plato helps us to see that we and various self-styled experts might not know as much about these as we thought.
Later philosophy tends to get more and more technical and jargon-filled, and (at least in Western philosophy) tends to assume a familiarity with Plato.
In many important ways, you would be either lost or missing an important piece of the puzzle were you to try to dive in to later philosophy without a knowledge of Plato, as philosophy to a large extent is a dialogue with earlier philosophers, of whom Plato is a seminal figure.
Plato is also a good sparring partner for when you're just dipping your feet in to the waters of philosophy. A boxer shouldn't expect to knock out the reigning heavyweight champion the first time he puts his boxing gloves on. Similarly, you should really have a go at Plato before you have a go at later philosophers, who themselves have engaged with Plato and tried to answer Plato or have another go at issues first raised by him.
A familiarity with philosophers from every historical period is just part of a well-rounded philosophical education. Skipping to contemporaries would just leave huge gaps in your education, especially if you skip some of the greatest and most influential philosophers of all time, like Plato.
But then again, I'd answer the questions you mentioned in a way I feel that most philosophers would find to be 'missing the point'. For example:
> What is justice?
A concept useful for regulating human societies. It's based on ultimately arbitrary heuristics that are effective for satisfying an approximately maximum number of people.
> What is good?
A word we use to label a fundamental behavior in our brains: we use values as something like utility functions in optimization processes. Ultimately there are constraints placed on the values we're capable of selecting which are imposed on us by our evolved biology, but we do have a good amount of freedom, so by studying human nature we can figure out which values are the most effective for creating the sort of lives we're interested in.
> What is the best way to govern?
We don't know yet. There probably is no best. If there is, we'll probably find it algorithmically.
> What is true?
There is too much ambiguity here to really answer, so I'll just choose one interpretation and say: whatever it is, it's highly unlikely that human minds would be capable of 'understanding' it ('understanding' being a human faculty, and not likely something important to the nature of the universe).
> Where does knowledge come from?
Brains.
> Why should any of this matter?
Because experience is real.
I'd highly recommend taking an intro to philosophy course, or one on ancient philosophy, where you can read the Socratic dialogues and engage with them in a group setting, along with others who are encountering these for the first time.
When done well, if you're lucky enough to have a good teacher and be in a group of students who are willing to engage fully with the reading and talk about it in class, this can be an experience like no other.
I see what you mean about doing philosophy in a group setting, but for what I'm interested in anyway, I'm not going to have a great time debating the above questions with an intro to philosophy class. A starting point for me to enjoy it would be that my interlocutors would need to be able to have some degree of understanding of the answers I gave above, what points might be in their favor, and what their limitations might be.
I can say no philosopher I've met personally would answer those questions like I did (though I think I've read some who would), so I'm still very curious to see why we choose different ways. But my guess is still just that they'd answer differently if they had more knowledge of cognitive science and other topics.
> A word we use to label a fundamental behavior in our brains: we use values as something like utility functions in optimization processes.
That position limits the degree to which ethics can be objective. Suppose some other culture believes in doing things we believe to be gravely immoral. If our idea of good is just "a behaviour in our brains" or a "utility function" or a product of "evolved biology", well then theirs is too, so how can we say our moral views are objectively better than theirs? The ability to say that certain behaviour is immoral, in an objective and transcultural way, is threatened by your position; and I think that threat is a good reason to reject it.
> > Where does knowledge come from?
> Brains.
You seem to treat (some version of) materialism as if it were obviously true, but I don't think its truth is obvious.
I'm inclined toward idealism, and I don't believe there are any good reasons to believe that materialism is more likely to be true than idealism.
You poke someone in the brain (or drop some chemicals in there), their behavior changes. This is a pretty good reason for considering the brain to be the generator of our minds. And then on top of that, we now have another hundred years or so of experiments (via neuroscience and its antecedents) and theoretical models which allow us to accurately predict things about how the brain in fact behaves, and how people's larger scale behavior conforms to that.
But that's only a reply I give because you called me a materialist after my answer of 'Brain.' In fact I'm not a thoroughgoing materialist, but we have enough data at this point to confidently say values arise from brains.
An idealist can say: Physical objects, events, and processes, and the correlations between them, are all patterns in the experiences of minds. "Brain" is a pattern in the experiences of minds. "Poke someone in the brain" or "drop some chemicals in there" are also patterns in the experiences of minds, and so likewise is "their behaviour changes". The fact that the former is regularly correlated with the later is a yet further pattern in the experiences of minds. There is nothing here that cannot be explained by idealism.
> This is a pretty good reason for considering the brain to be the generator of our minds
A materialist explains these observations in terms of brains generating minds, whereas an idealist can explain them in terms of minds generating brains. Since both can explain the evidence in terms of their own theories, it is unclear how this could be a reason to prefer one theory to the other.
> In fact I'm not a thoroughgoing materialist
I'd be interested to know what your position is.
But there is no evidence of such minds, right? We have no ideas about where or what they are, or actually anything anything at all about them?
> whereas an idealist can explain them in terms of minds generating brains
But the difference is that causality is moving in a particular direction in the example I gave about brains being poked or having chemicals added to them, where the mind is affected by such actions. However, it has never been demonstrated in the opposite direction: there is an absence of a brain somewhere, then a mind does something, then a brain manifests. If the causality there were actually bi-directional, then that sort of thing would be observed too.
Now I know that when you say 'mind' you are referring to something else, and I partly just give the above answer to show how misleading it is to use the same term for what you're talking about (which I assume is more like the 'mind' of a monistic panpsychism).
I can grant your assertion that there is a mind-like something underlying everything, it's the substrate through which all matter appears (including brains), and actually believe something a little like that myself—but it doesn't change the fact that at the end of the days we're left with the matter thus generated, and that it is governed by certain predictable rules, etc. So for spiritual purposes perhaps it makes sense go ahead and contemplate the mind-medium that is more fundamental than our physical reality; but for the purpose of understanding how our universe works, you want to engage the materialist perspective.
So I think we agree that at least for transcendent, truly fundamental matters, materialism is insufficient. I think where we disagree is about which sort of things are fundamental/transcendent or not: 'knowledge' is something that I believe to be totally mundane and amenable to scientific description (same with 'justice' and the best way of governing), whereas philosophers have a tendency to elevate it. It makes sense that they would elevate it because in the days of its original elevation it was as unapproachable and mysterious to them as anything—as say, the notion of an afterlife, is to us. But time has passed, science encroached on that territory, and a lot of philosophers need to catch up.
Well, I am a mind, and so I have direct evidence of the mind that I am.
I don't have direct evidence of the existence of other minds. But I do have indirect evidence of their existence. And I believe I am justified in believing in their existence.
> We have no ideas about where or what they are Why must a mind have a where? Must entities have a spatial location in order to exist? (Anyway, my sense experiences are from a particular varying spatial vantage point, so maybe that vantage point is the present location of my mind.)
As to what a mind is – according to idealism, minds are fundamental/irreducible/basic concepts, which cannot be explained in terms of anything else. Hence, to ask for an idea about "what a mind is", if that question presumes minds can be explained in terms of something more basic, is a mistaken question. But, the very same point applies to materialism, with respect to whatever it proposes to be the most fundamental concepts of reality–particles or waves or forces or fields or strings or branes or whatnot – whatever physicists ultimately settle upon as most fundamental, materialists will accept as most fundamental.
> or actually anything anything at all about them?
Well, it seems we can say lots of things about minds. They have a succession of thoughts, feelings, beliefs, desires, memories, habits, character, sense experiences, consciousness, unconsciousness, dreams, hallucinations, etc. We can describe their contents in great detail.
> which I assume is more like the 'mind' of a monistic panpsychism
When I say "mind", I am not intending to use that word in some special sense fundamentally different from the everyday one. I am simply proposing that mind, in (more or less) the everyday sense of that term, is a basic/fundamental/foundational aspect of reality rather than a non-basic/non-fundamental/non-foundational one.
"Monism" is ambiguous between type monism and token monism. Idealism and materialism are of course both forms of type monism, compared to substance dualism which is a type dualism. But not all idealists are token monists. Some idealists do of course say that only one mind really exists, and the existence of multiple minds is some sort of illusion. But, it is possible to be an idealist and yet insist on the existence of a real plurality of minds. I favour that later view.
Idealism needn't involve panpsychism either. It is open to an idealist to say that humans have minds, and even some higher animals have minds, but at the same time deny that rocks and trees and planets and stars and bacteria and atoms do. I observe correlations between my inner experiences and my outward behaviour – when I feel sad I will cry – and so observing similar outward behaviour in other humans, and even in some animals, I believe I am justified in concluding that those same inner feelings exist for them, even though I can't directly observe them. But I observe no such outward behaviour in bacteria or plants or rocks or planets or stars or atoms, so I don't have the same justification to conclude that they have minds.
> but for the purpose of understanding how our universe works, you want to engage the materialist perspective
I don't agree. Materialism is not part of the natural sciences, it is a metaphysical interpretation of the natural sciences. One can adopt a different metaphysical interpretation of the natural sciences – such as an idealist one – and then carry out the practice of the natural sciences just as well as the person who adopts the materialist metaphysical interpretation can.
> 'knowledge' is something that I believe to be totally mundane and amenable to scientific description (same with 'justice' and the best way of governing), whereas philosophers have a tendency to elevate it
To go back to my earlier point – if ethics/morality is "totally mundane and amenable to scientific description", then it cannot truly be objective in a transcultural and transpersonal way. I believe I have a moral duty to promote the idea that certain acts – for example, state violence against LGBT people – are gravely and objectively wrong, in a way that transcends cultural differences and personal opinions. Adopting your view undermines my ability to fulfil that duty. (In principle, if there was compelling rational evidence that your view was true, I would be forced to concede that evidence as overriding that duty – but I don't believe any such compelling evidence actually exists.) Hence, I cannot adopt your view.
The ideas presented by Plato may become outdated, but the mode of thinking required to challenge those ideas does not. Plato was not only conveying his thoughts, he was trying to teach us how to think.
I do agree with you that you should not expect to uncover some magical idea in Plato's works. But this is certainly not what Plato intended us to do. Instead, what Plato is trying to do is encode philosophical practice. This entails not a collection of ideas (magical or not), but rather an approach to philosophical discourse and hence to the world. Curiosity and scepticism, as you correctly point out, are important and are recurrent themes. But this just scratches the surface.
I'd be curious to hear about any others.
Additionally, my understanding is that his actual argumentation is generally pretty bad and he's really just trying to convince people of things that the thinks would be effective for them. That's mostly coming from reading Bertrand Russel, but the fact that his arguments are bad (structurally, not just because of the data he's missing) seems to be uncontroversial from what I can tell.
Bertrand Russell, of course, is a master of logic. But if you are drawing from his History of Philosophy, I'm not sure that is a particularly good source for views on ancient philosophy. I tend to think the best way to justify a claim is to look at the primary sources themselves (if we have them—which in the case of Plato we are pretty sure we have everything he wrote and then some extras).
In terms of scratching the surface, much of what Plato contributes is ways to approach particular problems. For example, if you look at the treatment of universals in the Parmenides and the Philebus, the approaches in the arguments here (severally considered) have a lot of staying power: in particular, you find related arguments being made regarding universals by Aristotle and on, going all the way up to the present day (including, for example, Bertrand Russell). What is going on here is not merely philosophical scepticism (though there is that), but also approaching and techniques that need to be solved in order to make progress on a particular problem. So, that is an example of how the dialogues go beyond simple scepticism. There are so many other examples: the dialogues are packed with them — which is part of the reason why treatments of many modern philosophical problems and approaches can be traced back to Plato.
That said, when you pointed out the universals qeustion it reminded me of the thing that probably impressed me the most in reading Plato. The level of abstraction he reached just skyrocketed things. It's there in a certain sense with the pre-Socrates with general statements like 'everything is flux' or whatever, but some of Plato's stuff does feel remarkably modern.
That said, I think my original point still holds: impressive for his time, but there are far better things to be reading now (unless you're looking specifically for historic content). Or maybe there's still something I'm missing?
I say "generally speaking," because there are parts of philosophy like this; in particular logic, where the development of formalization in predicate logic, in the nineteenth and twentieth century eclipsed the categorical formalizations of Aristotle and the propositional formalizations of the Stoics. But Plato's argument against instantiated universals in the 5th century crops up when anyone wants to do serious work on universals—and this holds up to the present day. Or, for example, anyone serious about the notion of knowledge would do well to carefully examine many of the arguments in the Theaetetus to discover where the blind allies are when it comes to giving a rigorous definition of knowledge.
Of course, knowing Plato will help you with historical context. But that historical context reaches across the centuries and informs present day conversations in philosophy. The reason is that philosophy is a particular practice and way of approaching the world, rather than a body of doctrine. In turns out that the way Plato approaches a particular problem will shed light and spur new ideas about how to approach that problem—such that we can juxtapose, say, Plato's conception of universals with D. M. Armstrong's conception of the same. Or Plato's conception of knowledge with that of Bacon or Karl Popper.
So, I take issue with the claim that there are "far better things to be reading now." There are many great things to be reading now; but that does mean that Plato's work has been eclipsed, or that we have nothing to learn from reading his work beyond satisfying historical curiosity.
Might you have any comments?
In terms of order, you can do worse than begin the five traditional "death of Socrates" dialogues. These are the Apology (Socrates' trial speech and the nature of the philosophical life), the Crito (the nature of law and implicit political contracts with the state), the Euthyphro (the nature of piety), the Meno (the nature of virtue and knowledge), and the Phaedo (the afterlife and universal objects).
These five dialogues are from different periods in Plato's writing: the Apology is probably quite early and is a good introduction to Socrates; the Euthyphro is a nice "what is x?" dialogue which comes to no resolution, which is typical of early one-on-one exchanges, and although fictional might be the sort of thing the actual Socrates went around doing; the Crito is probably a late-early dialogue, and mixes in some more serious concerns about the nature of the state that will capture Plato's attention in his later writings; the Meno starts out as a "what is x?" dialogue, but the second half transitions to consider the nature of knowledge and how we can know anything (if at all); and the Phaedo is a full-blown middle-period dialogue where Plato deploys his account of universals called the Theory of Forms (which he arguably discards or submerges in the late period, but is generally what people think of when they think of Platonic doctrine).
After the Phaedo, I would hit the other big middle-period dialogues that are classic Plato: the Republic, the Symposium, the Phaedrus. The Republic may very well be the greatest piece of philosophy ever written; if not, it is up there in the top five-to-ten. It ostensibly deals with the nature of justice, but it covers huge areas including knowledge, beauty, truth, education, and more. It develops some of the themes from the Phaedo. The Symposium is a collection of beautiful speeches on the nature of love, again developing some of the themes of the Phaedo, but also the Republic. The Phaedrus looks at the nature of love and the nature of rhetoric, picking up themes from the Republic and the Symposium.
That's a lot of stuff. If you want one and only one thing to read that's short, go for the Apology. If you want one and only one thing to read that's all-encompassing, go for the Republic.
Yes. For one, because those are foundational texts of the western civilization. Even if Plato's text were insignificant, understanding one's civilization (in a way that goes beyond the pop culture of the day) remains as illuminating as ever.
Second, because texts written 100, 50, 20 and 1 year ago are still influenced by them, including seminal texts in their own right.
Third, because good philosophy (including theology) is perennial, not tied to this or that era. If anything, it will be this or that era that will come to pass, while Platos ideas (and other such inquiries) will still be around.
It's like Lisp: those who don't understand philosophy will construct their own philosophical system badly (or adopt wholesale some poorly made IKEA-grade one, adapted to appeal to consumers of their era -- from the plethora of self-help gurus to various pulp attempts at philosophizing).
> Third, because good philosophy (including theology) is perennial, not tied to this or that era
For historical relevance sure, but from what I can tell the rest of it has already passed its time.
> those who don't understand philosophy will construct their own philosophical system badly
This is a common defense I hear from philosophers: the 'real' philosophy is always around the corner—the 'real' interpretation, the 'real' way of doing it. But from what I can tell, 'real' is just a colorful expression of how positive their subjective experience of reading so-and-so was.
Or maybe the several hundred hours or so I've spent reading philosophy (or meta-philosophy, inquiring into the proper way of approaching it) is insufficient for me personally and I'll never 'really' understand Plato and others.
It’s too much to divorce a topic from philosophy and later go back to philosophy for a defense of its worth.
I wouldn't say there's much in it that has "passed its time". What would that be? It's not like in the era of Trump (or Hillary if you prefer) we have mastered good government. Or we can't benefit from inquiries about the nature of good, or the nature of the state because they're "old".
It's not like some great scientific discovery rendered those obsolete (and if so, only the most superficial parts), or like man changed in essence. We don't have any settled once and for all "better" arguments -- and those all arguments are still not just foundational, but very current.
Someone not familiar with them, still uses half of them (badly) when explaining their viewpoints or politics -- just like someone who doesn't know about parsers might be able to parse something, hooking together regular expressions and ad-hoc code, but not very rigorously, and missing an awful lot of tricks.
>This is a common defense I hear from philosophers: the 'real' philosophy is always around the corner—the 'real' interpretation, the 'real' way of doing it.
"Real philosophy" is not some rare event that arrives accompanied by some Michal Bay-styled revelation, with explosions and fireworks. It's an inquiry and a dialogue.
People have been really reading philosophy, real philosophy, -- and applying it to their lives and their states, for millennia.
Not sure why a philosopher (which are few and far between today, most are just tired tenured academics rehashing and elaborating on what others wrote. Original philosophers come once in a blue moon) would say that "real philosophy" is "around the corner".
If it was easy everyone would be doing it. There's nothing special about a traditional roundhouse kick anymore either. Various martial arts traditions figured out that bit of applied kinesthesiology ages ago. But mastering it still takes practice, practice, practice.
That should be something people should strive for in every discussion. It's called the Principle of Charity.
Genuinely interested to learn which ideas you found to be incorrect
But I'll give you an easy incorrect one: his 'tripartite theory of the soul'.
See what really gets me about people still recommending Plato is that they'll encourage others to go read some (now) useless theory like that, when they could instead be reading some modern cognitive science which covers the same ground, but with thousands of years of progress.
It's to my mind similar to telling someone to study an old doctrine about the world being composed of earth, wind, and fire instead of learning modern Chemistry.
But that‘s exactly the point behind the footnotes remark that you seem to dislike.
Plato owned philosophy so completely that everyone, even centuries later, still referenced him.
You coming across ideas first via some more recent source does not invalidate him any more than Wordpress invalidates the importance of Movable Type.