More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He says that no one really knows about the gods and other things he is telling us about; rather, even if you are lucky enough to believe the truth, you won’t know (§186). This is just as revolutionary as his ideas about God. He’s distinguishing between believing something and really knowing it, a distinction which will be tremendously important down the line when we get to Plato, for example. In fact, this is important for philosophy as a whole: the attempt to sort out what we can know from what we merely believe.
Socrates, like Pythagoras, became a literary character—a vessel for the ideas and imaginings of other people.
Still, all ancient authors assume that Pythagoras himself had an intense interest in mathematics, and we may as well go along with this, while remembering that his interest may have been more religious or symbolic than technical.
since the ancients were always trying to say that every famous philosopher was the student of some other famous philosopher.
In any case, Parmenides was strongly identified with his city of Elea, and his followers were often called the “Eleatics.”
Couldn’t there be, say, exactly ten billion atoms bouncing around in an infinite emptiness? In answer to this, the ancient atomists could invoke a rule which is sometimes called the principle of sufficient reason. It states that there has to be some good reason or explanation for each feature of the universe.
“By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention color, but really atoms and void” (§549).
Anyone trying to come to grips with Anaxagoras should try to do what Socrates wasn’t able to. That is, they should try to understand not only the theory of Mind and the theory of mixed physical substances, but also how Mind and the physical substances interact.
As one Hippocratic author says, “prayer is good, but in addition to calling on the gods, one should lend a hand.”2
There’s a disturbing implication here: if one can always argue with equal plausibility on both sides of any question, then arguing won’t get us to the truth. We’re only going to be persuaded by whichever argument is presented more effectively.
So Aristophanes evidently saw little distinction between Socrates and his sophistic contemporaries.
Again, Xenophon’s Socrates appeals to the political interests of his audience in making this point: he says that choosing an ignorant man to be the leader of a city would be like choosing an ignorant man as one’s doctor. We don’t let untrained men experiment on our bodies, and neither should we let men without knowledge experiment on the body politic.
Plato’s Socrates, and Plato himself, worried that such people would also get it wrong on particular occasions, precisely because they lack general and consistent knowledge. When the chips are down, you want to follow the person who has knowledge, not the person who has some true beliefs.
The point of philosophical argument is not winning at all costs, like these verbally pugilistic sophists do. It is to seek wisdom.
The Gorgias presented by Plato would agree with this. He tells Socrates that if a doctor and a rhetorician debate in front of an audience about how best to cure a patient, the audience will agree with the rhetorician and not the doctor (456b–c). He gives examples to prove his point: for instance, it was the great orator Pericles who persuaded the Athenians to build a defensive wall, not a bunch of stonemasons, who are experts in wall-building (455e).
Things clearly have no changed in 2000 years. Now we have rhetoricians on YouTube and Facebook convincing everyone that doctors don't know what they are talking about, or that really scientists are just coming up with "theories" and my uninformed opinion is just as good as theirs as long as it sounds good and is "common sense".
