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

by Peter S. Adamson

to show us that Aristophanes was wrong: Socrates is no sophist. He wants to lead young men like Clinias to virtue and wisdom, rather than to perplexity. On the other hand, Plato...

In both dialogues Socrates has a chance to influence a young man and make him virtuous. We know he fails with Charmides, and things don’t go very well with Clinias either. This leads us to wonder: can talking to Socrates really make a young man virtuous?

So why not go for broke and commit these most outrageous injustices, if it will allow us to fulfill our desires—not just today, but for the rest of our lives?

This is a central question posed in Plato’s dialogues, and never with more urgency than in his early masterpiece, the Gorgias.

Gorgias was a teacher o...

In the Gorgias, Socrates trades verbal blows not only with Gorgias himself, but also with two of Gorgias’ followers, Polus and Callicles. Even though the dialogue came to be named after Gorgias, it is Callicles who cuts the most memorable figure, as a passionate defender of immorality.

Socrates says he wants to discover what rhetoric is, but

winds up mounting a defense of the virtuous life.

what is the art which Gorgias claims to have mastered and to be able to teach? The art, of course, is rhetoric. But what’s

rhetoric, exactly?

According to Gorgias, rhetoric is an art that concerns speech, not just any old speech, but speech about “...

In short, the art of rhetoric is the art of speech which is persuasive.

Gorgias argues that we shouldn’t blame the teacher in a case like this (457b–c). We should blame the student who misuses the art for evil instead of good.

But this art of persuasion will not give the rhetorician any insight into what the assembly really should do.

But Gorgias has described rhetoric as producing persuasion in the absence of knowledge. Rhetoric is starting to look like the art of convincing people to make mistakes.

Socrates is not impressed. He insists that without knowledge and wisdom the rhetoricians may put to death whoever they want, but that doesn’t mean they are really powerful (466b). True power is being able to do what is really good for you. If a tyrant or a rhetorician, blundering in his ignorance, uses his so-called power to put to death those who try to give him good advice, then he is actually harming himself as well as his city.

Here we’ve come to one of Socrates’ most famous doctrines: that it is better to suffer wrongdoing than to do wrong oneself

Not that Socrates wanted to be put to death, but it was a matter of relative indifference to him, whereas he put the highest possible value on his own virtue.

things are admirable either because they are pleasant, or because they are beneficial, or both (474e). Justice is not

much fun, as we all know—all that telling the truth and paying back our debts. So if justice is admirable, it can’t be because it’s pleasant; it must be because it’s beneficial (475c). With unjust things it will be the opposite. Since they’re shameful, they must be either unpleasant or harmful, or both. Obviously, being an unjust tyrant isn’t unpleasant—in fact, it’s a non-stop orgy of pleasure, what with all the feasting and chuckling as one devises new and innovative ways to put one’s enemies to death. So if injustice is shameful, it can only be because it’s harmful. Thus, people who do unjust things are harming themselves, just as much as they are harming other people.

there’s something that might disturb us about Socrates’ defense of just action, and virtue more generally. Do we really think that we should be virtuous because it will benefit us?

accuse him of failing to defend altruism.

Callicles thinks, then, that justice is nothing but a trick for getting the strong to surrender their natural right to seize as much pleasure as they can handle.

hedonism is the view that pleasure is the good. Socrates thinks that the life Callicles describes, in which every desire is constantly being satisfied, sounds more like a life of slavery than mastery.

The allegory represents a fundamental flaw of hedonism, which is that pleasure-seeking is an endless task.

Far better to content oneself with as little as possible, so that one is spared the trouble.

Is virtue even the sort of thing that can be taught?

the theory is that we don’t ever actually learn at all. Rather, when we seem to be learning, we are in fact remembering or recollecting. We are recollecting knowledge not from some point earlier in our lives, but rather from a time before our lives began. Before we were born, we knew everything that can be known, and the apparent process of learning is just a way of jogging the memory to give us access to this knowledge.

Would knowing what virtue is be the same thing as giving a good definition of virtue? If so, what are good definitions like?

The challenge is what we now call Meno’s paradox, or the learner’s paradox. It goes like this: either you know something or you don’t. If you know it, you don’t need to inquire into it, since you already know it. If you don’t know it, then you do need to inquire into it. But how can you? After all, you don’t know what it is. So how will you go about searching for it, and for that matter, how will you recognize it if you do come across it

how do we get started when we are trying to get knowledge?

he tells a kind of religious myth, which he says he’s heard from some priests and priestesses. According to this myth, our souls are immortal—they will always exist, and they have always existed. Before our current earthly lives, our souls have already existed for an endless time, and during this endless time they have learned all there is to know. Thus, we are never in the position of

knowing nothing. On the contrary, we always know everything. It’s just that we’ve forgotten most, if not all, of the things we knew in our previous existence. It follows that when we seem to be learning new knowledge, we are in fact only being reminded of things we already knew

“theory of

recollection,” probably Plato’s most famous doctrine apart from the “theory of Forms,”

Plato is just trying to set out what we would now call a theory of innate knowledge. In other words, he’s saying that humans are born with a great deal of knowledge already built in, so to speak.

could I fall short of knowing what virtue is, while still doing better than total ignorance of virtue? Plato sees that the answer is yes: I could have mere beliefs about virtue, and if those beliefs were true, then that would be better than ignorance but not as good as certain knowledge.

What exactly is the difference between true belief and knowledge? Actually, if I’ve got true belief, why do I need knowledge?

He takes true belief to be less reliable than knowledge, because it is not grounded in an adequate “account.” By this, Socrates seems to mean that if I know something is true, I should be able to understand and explain why it is true. It is this ability, and not my degree of confidence, that marks the difference between true beliefs and knowledge.

people who have only true belief, and not knowledge, may be unable to impart the truth to other people.

If virtue is knowledge, as Socrates typically

claims, then why are there no teachers of it? Here true belief might come to the rescue: the virtuous men might be the ones who have true beliefs about what to do, rather than knowledge.

The question is, then, what you need to add to true belief in order to get knowledge—

thought: what if everything is like this? Suppose that there is no truth apart from the way things seem to each person?

In that case, nothing is true absolutely. Rather, truth is relative: something might be true for me and false for you, but neither false nor true in itself. This relativist theory of truth is one still arises in contemporary philosophy, but it has its roots in the dialogues of Plato.

“epistemology,” which means the study of knowledge—

the first work to devote itself fully to epistemology is the Theaetetus. It explores some of the ideas of the Meno but goes well beyond them, investigating not only a relativist theory of truth, but also the question of how false judgment is possible and how knowledge relates to belief.

if knowledge is perception, then whatever seems to me to be the case must actually be the case for me

truth is relative:

if Protagorean relativism is true, then the things in the world around us will have no stable natures from moment to moment.