Classical Philosophy (A History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps #1)

by Peter S. Adamson

The fact that the earliest Greek philosophers are called the Pre-Socratics shows the extent to which Socrates is seen as the pivotal figure in the history of Greek philosophy. Yet some of Socrates’ predecessors could claim to represent a turning-point. How about Xenophanes, with his rational skepticism towards

traditional religion? Or Heraclitus, arguably the first man to be primarily a philosopher rather than an all-around polymath and scientist? And what about Parmenides, the first thinker to pursue a path of pure rational argument, and the inventor of metaphysics? Of course, Socrates did add something new to the tradition, above all a new focus on ethics. With his relentless questioning of his fellow citizens, demanding that that they account for their choices and values, Socrates invented the notion that philosophy is primarily an inquiry into how we should live.

The

philosopher and logician Alfred North Whitehead famously remarked that the history of philosophy is “a series of footnotes to Plato.”

Philosophy did not begin or end with Plato; but it did come of age with him. Many central issues of philosophy are found for the first time in Plato, such as the nature of language or the immortality of the soul.

Plato is in a way absent in every dialogue. Plato never made himself a character in one of his dialogues, and he never wrote philosophy in anything other than dialogue form. He does not speak to us directly, which leaves us wondering which, if any, of the ideas expressed by Plato’s characters represent his own views.

After Socrates’ death, Plato spent time away from Athens, in southern Italy, where he could have encountered Pythagorean ideas, a further source of inspiration. One shouldn’t exaggerate the importance of this, I think. Plato’s dialogues show that he had a wide knowledge of most of the Pre-Socratics. He was especially interested in Heraclitus and Parmenides,

The school was situated in a grove outside the city—the Akademeia, named in honor of a mythical Greek hero named Hekademus. (This, of

course, is where we get our word “academy.”) Plato and his colleagues engaged not only in the pursuits we would think of as properly philosophical, but also practiced dialectical reasoning and argument, classification and division, and mathematics.

sign at the entrance to the Academy said “Let no man enter who has n...

He also had colleagues who did serious mathematical research, in particular Archytas, a Pythagorean philosopher. Another contemporary was Isocrates, not to be confused with Socrates: Isocrates was a brilliant rhetorician, and heir to the sophistical tradition Socrates had confronted in the fifth century. As we’ll be seeing, Plato devotes a lot of attention to the question of rhetoric, and Isocrates may be one of his targets.

True philosophy consists in a discussion between teacher and pupil, and the insights one achieves in this way cannot just be stated in so many words. The author of the Seventh Letter gives a kind of metaphysical argument for this (342a–344c). Words are distant echoes or images of true reality, so that it is impossible to capture reality perfectly in language. Still worse is putting one’s thoughts into writing rather than live speech, since the written words will inevitably be vulnerable to

distortion and misunderstanding. As the definitely real Plato says in one of his dialogues, the Phaedrus, written words cannot explain or defend themselves the way we can explain and defend ourselves in conversation

As I’ve said, Plato never speaks to us in his own voice. He is not one of the characters, he is the intelligence that lurks unseen behind the characters. Why did he write philosophy in this way?

The Seventh Letter, if it is really by Plato, would help to explain this choice. The letter suggests that Plato didn’t think it was possible to state philosophical truth in a book—hence his preference for dialogues over didactic treatises. Alternatively, Plato may have thought that although it is possible to state philosophical truth in theory, in practice he was unable to do so.

In any case, it seems plausible that, for Plato, philosophy occurs above all in discussions, not written works. When he did put pen to papyrus, he sought to re-create this context on the page.

I think we can go further, if we consider what it is like to read a Platonic dialogue. The dialogues are entertaining, but they can also be frustrating. Why are the people talking to Socrates, his interlocutors, letting him get away with apparently bad arguments? Why aren’t they asking him to explain certain points more fully? Above all, why do so many dialogues end in a frustrating impasse, with Socrates and his interlocutors agreeing that they haven’t achieved any insight into the topic at hand?

He wants his readers to engage actively with his dialogues. The readers should be alert to spot those overlooked alternatives, to see that some solutions are

only being hinted at. You might say that the written text is one partner in a further dialogue, a dialogue between the reader and the text.

Plato deploys a full arsenal of allusions, metaphors, and cross-references such as we might expect from a novelist or playwright. This again invites the reader to think about the subtext as well as the surface meaning of the dialogue. The dramatic bits of stage-setting that surround Plato’s philosophical arguments are as important as the arguments themselves.

rather than asking simply why Plato wrote dialogues, it may be more

fruitful to consider how he uses the form for different effects in different dialogues.

The dialogues he wrote

this early period adhered more or less closely to Socrates’ actual practice in discussion. As I’ve mentioned, they usually end with an impasse—in Greek the word is aporia—where everyone in the dialogue agrees that they can’t answer the question at hand.

A famous example from the Euthyphro is the title character’s proposal that what is pious is simply that which all the gods love (9e). The difficulty with this idea is that it may get the direction of explanation wrong: are things really pious because the gods love them, or is it rather the reverse, and the gods love things because they are pious? The problem uncovered here by Plato is destined to become a mainstay of debates in the philosophy of religion. Do the gods, or God, dictate morality and goodness, in which

case apparently anything could have been good? Or does God want us to do things because they are good? Although this difficulty goes under the title of the “Euthyphro dilemma,” here Plato is at least as interested in the methodological question of how explanations work as in the application to piety as such.

This is typical of the early or “Socratic” dialogues. These tend to depict Socrates inquiring with partners into a certain concept, usually a virtue like piety or courage, and failing to achieve clarity in the end. Then comes the “middle period,” during which Plato wrote more ambitious, longer works, and moved away from representing typical Socratic encounters. The Republic, Plato’s best-known dialogue, is the star example for this period. Finally, there are the “late” works. We know that a hugely long and, most readers tend to...

be more technical and less dramatic in their setting. Often there is one lead character who controls the discussion by taking advantage of an interlocutor who doesn’t give him much trouble. In many dialogues of this later period Plato removes Socrates from...

there is no general agreement about the exact chronological order of the dialogues.

Charmides

sophrosune, usually translated as “temperance” or “moderation.”

Socrates invites

Charmides to define sophrosune (159a), and the attempt to do so occupies their attention for the rest of the dialogue.

dialogue’s fundamental question, which is not so much “What is temperance?” as “How we can know whether someone is temperate?” and “How can we know whether we ourselves are temperate?”

Here we arrive at Plato’s favorite themes: knowledge of others, and knowledge of ourselves.

The dialogue now becomes an inquiry into the nature and usefulness of knowledge. Nowadays we would say that the dialogue has gone from dealing with ethics to dealing with epistemology—the study of knowledge.

On the one hand, knowledge of knowledge seems to be absolutely essential. On the other hand, knowledge of knowledge seems empty and useless.

Some of what has been said looks extremely Socratic: in particular, Socrates

might agree with Critias that temperance, and all the other virtues, are kinds of knowledge. This allows Plato to use one of his favorite tricks: he diverts the discussion away from virtue, toward a more general inquiry into the nature of knowledge. As I said, we go from talking ethics to talking epistemology. On the other hand, in other dialogues we’ve seen suggestions that for Socrates virtue is the same thing as knowledge. So perhaps this is no diversion at all. Plato is simply working through the implications of this Socratic thesis. If virtue is knowledge, then discussion of virtue and discussion of knowledge are one and the same. Epistemology and ethics are nowadays taught and studied as separate parts of philosophy. But if virtue is knowledge, then this firm separation is a big mistake.

Euthy...

But this time Socrates’ opponents are more fearsome than the rather doltish Critias. They are two sophists, brothers named Euthydemus and

Dionysodorus.

They ask him questions, and show that whichever answer Clinias gives he will wind up contradicting himself. For instance, who is it who learns, wise people or ignorant people? Presumably wise people, and Clinias says so. But the

brothers point out that wise people already have knowledge, so they don’t need to learn. So it must be the ignorant people, Clinias says. Wrong again. The ignorant students in any group are precisely the ones who don’t learn, otherwise they would hardly be ignorant

classic Socratic conclusion that anything that seems to be good—money, food, power, health—turns out to be good only if you use it with knowledge (281d–e). You remember this point: money is useful, but only if you use it on things that will be good for you, and this requires knowledge.

The brothers ask you whether you know anything at all. Sure, you say, there are some things I know. So if you’re knowing, say the brothers, then you must know everything. Otherwise, you’d be knowing and not-knowing at the same time, which is a contradiction

Some of the arguments made by the brothers have deep philosophical implications. This is a dialogue in which fundamental questions of metaphysics and epistemology underlie apparent silliness. To give just one example, the brothers argue that it’s impossible for two people to contradict one another (28sd–286b). If you say that the horse is white, and I say that the horse is black, then we can only be talking about two different things: you’re talking about a white horse and I’m talking about a black horse. If you’re right and there is no black horse, then I’m not talking about anything at all—so I’m saying nothing. And how can I contradict you without saying anything? This argument too seems trivial at first, until we reflect that the brothers sound a lot like Parmenides. If you

remember, he too said that it is impossible to think about or speak of that which does not exist. The sophists are exploiting this thought for their own nefarious purposes—to show that it is impossible even to disagree.

Indeed, many of the puzzles that arise here, in an apparently frivolous way, return in other dialogues and are considered at greater length. One example is the question about whether it is the wise or the ignorant who learn—this is remarkably similar to Meno’s paradox, which we’ll be looking at shortly. Equally fundamental to the Euthydemus is the question of how we should treat other people in philosophical argument. The point of philosophical argument is not winning at all costs, like these verbally pugilistic sophists do. It is to seek wisdom.

This makes the dialogue another attempt