Plato and Platonism

by Julius Moravcsik

Plato and Platonism reviews the natures and limits of Platonic interpretation. Students, academics and researchers will find that Moravcsik's careful and rigorous analysis offers an understanding of what Platonism in our times would have been like. The book leads us to an appreciation of genuine Platonism, rarely discussed today.

Genres: Philosophy

355 pages, Paperback

First published June 2, 2000

About the author

Julius Matthew Emil Moravcsik was an American philosopher who specialized in ancient Greek philosophy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_...

Reviews

[IWB · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moravcsik’s general thesis in Plato & Platonism is that the history of philosophy up to Aristotle is a series of nature-explaining hypotheses. At different times throughout this history, these hypotheses have had different explanatory patterns and different explanatory entities. Moravcsik identifies three main kinds of these hypotheses. There are origination explanations, constituency explanations, and what I’m calling, transcendent explanations. Moravcsik calls this latter kind the Platonic model, which is an explanation of nature characterized by the separate, abstract structure that governs the elements existing within space and time. It is the Platonic model of this kind of hypothesis that Moravcsik explicates throughout the book. Given the tightly entwined nature of Plato’s views on being, knowledge, and virtue, explicating the Platonic model, according to Moravcsik, bears particularly on metaphysics, but is also important for its relation to epistemology and ethics.
Moravcsik begins by fleshing out how Plato’s explanatory hypothesis accounts for reality. In doing so, Moravcsik introduces Plato’s concept of reason and its relation to understanding by means of the key notion of techne-oriented epistemology, which is a salient notion for the remainder of the book. The techne-oriented epistemology is in contrast with what Moravcsik refers to as post-cartesian evidence based epistemologies, whose key epistemic notion is propositional knowledge, whereas Plato’s key epistemic notion is the understanding.

Moravcsik claims that understanding has two aspects, the phenomenological, which are the experiences accompanying learning) and the conceptual, which are the formal aspects understanding expressed in epistemic and propositional logics. Plato’s explanatory model fulfills the phenomenological aspects of understanding but not the conceptual. According to Moravcsik, to expect Plato’s techne-oriented epistemology is not reducible to the key epistemic concept of propositional knowledge, which are what post-cartesian epistemologies are based on. It follows from this Plato’s techne-based epistemology can’t fit into a post-cartesian epistemology. Moravcsik doesn’t explicitly state this conclusion, but it is implied by both his exposition of Plato’s criteria for legitimate techne, and his claim that knowledge does not admit of degrees but that understanding does. The claim that Plato’s techne-based epistemology can’t fit into a post-cartesian is further bolstered by Moravcsik’s claim that understanding contrasts not only with ignorance but also with being well-informed, stipulated as knowing many truths. One can know many truths, says Moravcsik, and yet lack understanding of deeper issues (this hints at the divided line). Seeing the deeper issues, says Moravcsik, involves seeing how a complex is more than the sum of its parts.

Moravcsik’s introductory sketch left me some questions. According to Moravcsik, “ understanding is a series of discoveries rather than constructions or creations of pragmatic dispositions.” Moravcsik thinks this realist view should be attributed to Plato since what is understood are abstract structures whose existence is independent of minds. Granting this realism, and granting Moravcsik’s claim that understanding admits of degrees, in what sense can one be said to understand, if at all, putatively vague objects, such as heaps? Moravcsik’s sketch seems compatible with a kind of realism in which things such as heaps have precise, though unknowable, reference points of demarcation for vague predicates. There is a definite number of articles of clothing that make up a heap of laundry. If this view of realism is compatible with Moravcsik’s interpretation of Plato, then how does one have a degreed understanding of heaps, which is just to apprehend how a complex is more than the sum of its parts? Does the object itself delimit the complex or is the complex referring to only the object of understanding but also the faculties of understanding? If vague objects are restricted domains of understanding, does this restriction also admits of degrees?

This book is an exceptionally well argued for book and you’ll certainly glean something useful from it, even if you disagree with Moravcsik’s sentiments (which I do on a number of points). This book is not meant for the beginner.