Day 66: Statesman 272a-276e

Today: more mythologizing about the cosmos, more discussion of kingship, and more methodological discussion about the right way to divide classes into subclasses in an inquiry.

Happy reading!

Day 65: Statesman 267d-271e (pgs. 309-313)

Today: a small discussion of some possible differences between kingship and other kinds of "herding" (why does the king need help in a way that, e.g., a shepherd doesn't?), followed by a myth (is 'myth' the right word? The visitor says there's an "element of play") about the structure and movements of the cosmos. A few quick notes:

(a) The cosmos is an intelligent living creature. (269d)

(b) It moves with the best possible motion for something embodied, which is not the same as the best motion simpliciter. (269d-e)

(c) Every now and then the universe has to change its motion such as to be a big shock to living creatures in it (including humans). (270c-e) The details of how this goes seem to be a matter of great controversy, down to how to translate various sentences in the text. (See n. 31, p. 313)

(d) There appear to be times when humans are generated not from humans but from the earth (271a-c)

Happy reading!

Day 64: Statesman 263e-267d (pgs. 304-308)

Today:

(a) More discussion of the divisions within "self-directed herding." It is easy to understand why John Cooper wrote the last paragraph of the dialogue introduction the way he did, exhorting the reader to work through the "visitor's use of lengthy 'divisions.'"

(b) Plenty here to help us try to answer Colfert's question from yesterday. What's pretty obvious is that part of the recommendation is not to split a class into class X and not-X, expecting an a priori guarantee that the not-X part will be a _class_. What's less obvious is (i) why this matters so much in context, (ii) what 'middle' means in this context, and (iii) what on earth a class is. Some brief, unresearched, and probably fairly obvious comments... re: (i), presumably the idea is that inquiry goes better if the things you're thinking about pick out (something like) natural kinds. Re: (ii), my sense is that 'middle' means nothing more being a location that allows for equal splitting, in a very deflated sense of "equal"--that is, the fact that a class splits into two classes under distinction X is sufficient to guarantee that distinction X counts as a 'middle.' Re: (iii), who knows! My instinct in (i) is to think roughly in terms of natural kinds.

(c) It's been a while since I groaned out loud at a math pun (see 266a-b). A brief note is that in the phrase "the power of the diagonal of our power," the phrase "the diagonal of our power" is not saying what the dunamis is the dunamis _for_, the way that the diagonal of the unit triangle is the dunamis of or for the two-foot square; rather, it is saying which dunamis the "animals' dunamis" is to be identified with; the diagonal of (what) our dunamis (is a dunamis for) is _itself_ a dunamis, and it is this dunamis that is the dunamis of the four-foot square.

That might not have made sense: the point is just that, unless I'm wrong, "diagonal" is coordinated (is that the right word?) with the first "power," not a statement of what the power is a power "for."

Happy reading!

Day 63: Statesman 259d-263e (p. 299-303)

Our reading today continues the search for the Statesman through the method of collection and division.

262b: I found one of the Visitor's claims here particularly puzzling. In a meta-methodological moment, he attempts to justify the bifurcating or dichotomous approach to the method of division by saying that "it's safer to go along cutting through the middle of things, and that way one will be more likely to encounter real classes" (262b). I'm honestly not quite sure what to make of this justification. Any suggestions would be very welcome!

Happy reading, everyone!

Day 62: Statesman 257a-259d (pgs. 294-298)

The first of 13 days of the _Statesman_! Today we got Cooper's introduction, some dramatic preliminaries, and a bit of discussion of knowledge and categorization.

1. At 258d-e we get a quick distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge, and the distinction appears implicitly also at 259c. Note that the distinction is put in somewhat different terms: at 258, between simply providing knowledge vs. also being naturally bound up with practical actions; at 259, the king's knowledge counts as theoretical because it involves much more "understanding and force of mind" than "use of the hands or body in general."

2. Arithmetic shows up twice in these first few pages of the dialogue, once as an example of theoretical knowledge, and once in the strange opening lines, when Socrates says that the sophist, statesman, and philosopher "differ in value by more than can be expressed in terms of mathematical proportion."

Happy reading!

Day 61: Sophist 265d-268d (p. 290-293)

Today we have the final classification of sophists and statesmen, and we're done another dialogue!

Just two notes:

1. The role of appearances in Plato's metaphysics is fascinating. This is the obvious thing to say, but I'll say it anyway: For Plato, appearances are primarily things in the world: shadows, reflections, speeches, paintings, performances, etc. (266b-c). However, for most of us (and perhaps for Aristotle as well), appearances are primarily internal phenomena: they are, at least in part, how things seem to us. I don't have much more to say about this difference here. I just find it to be of general interest, and Plato's externalized view of appearances is clearly important to his last argument in the Sophist.

2. For a reader of the Nicomachean Ethics, it's hard to read the 'imitators of justice' passage at 267b ff. without thinking about the description of character development in NE II.1-4 (which shows up in Rep. IV as well). For Aristotle, in contrast to what Plato seems to be suggesting here, there is an important sense in which mimicking justice without yet being just is a precisely the way to eventually become just. Of course, the imitation of virtue isn't the same as the real thing, but when done in the right way, it can produce the real thing. Another important difference between some phases of Platonic thought, and Aristotle?

Happy reading!

Day 60: Sophist 261b-265d (pgs. 285-289)

Today: more application of the newly developed metaphysics to the questions of what falsity (especially false speech and belief) could be and what the sophist is.

In an exciting development, it appears that Plato holds that perception can be true and false. One reason this is interesting is in relation to the _Theaetetus_, where we learned that perception couldn't be knowledge because it grasps the wrong kinds of properties (e.g., redness and hardness, not being and unity). That would still leave it open whether, for Plato, when we see a red cube, we see the redness of the cube or that the cube is red. Here in the _Sophist_ it's looking much more like the latter.

Happy reading!

Day 59: Sophist 256d-261b (pgs. 280-284)

Very tough reading today. We finish the main discussion of the relationships between the tricky "higher-level" forms, and then near the end of the reading move on to an application (I think) of the discussion, which is that some things that are _do_ (contra Parmenides) share in not-being, so that false belief and speech are possible. There are a few comments, doubtless developed in the last part of the dialogue, applying this conclusion to the puzzle of what sophists and sophistry are.

I'd love to have some original things to put here, but the reading is really quite detailed, and this philosophy of mind paper isn't going to write itself...

Happy reading!

Day 58: Sophist 252d-256d (pgs. 275-279)

Today: lots of detailed argument about the relationships between the forms being, change, rest, same, and different.

1. I'm sure lots could be said about why those five items consist of two pairs of (what we would think of as) opposites and being, and does not include not being. I'm not entirely sure why that's so.

2. Note to self: figure out the details of the arguments at 255a-b and 256a-b.

Happy reading!

Day 57: Sophist 248b-252d (pgs. 270-274)

If I were really clever, I'd have made another post titled "Hiatus!" that contained an in-depth analysis of the state of the stylometry literature.

Today's reading is roughly two-thirds of the way through the long discussion of _is_, _being_, _not-being_, and related items/predicates/names. At 251b and following we get a famous (I think) argument against the "Late-Learners'" view that, because "it's impossible for that which is many to be one and for that which is one to be many," there are no strictly accurate predications of the form "X is Y" whenever Y is a different name than X. (Key example at 251c: it's wrong to say that man is good; what is proper is to say that man is man and that good is good.) The problem is that their view presupposes that _being_ (and--see 252c--_separate_, _from others_, _of itself_, "and a million other things") is predicated of things (in the X-position above) that are not _being_.

There's a funny connection between this whole discussion of being and not-being and Parmenides and modern philosophy: if I'm recalling correctly, people get really worked up on the issue of what the empty set refers to; perhaps they're combining causal theories of reference with sensible worries about the causal efficacy of nonexistent things. (I really should reread Russell's "On Denoting" if I want to get this stuff right.)

Finally, in Sunday's reading I encountered a new favorite line in Plato, at 239b-c:

VISITOR: "[...]Try to say something correct about that which is not, without attaching either being, one, or numerical plurality to it.
THEAETETUS: I'd have to have a strangely large amount of enthusiasm for the project to try it myself after seeing what you've gone through.

Happy reading!

Hiatus!

Spring breaks have kept us from posting on the blog, but we'll be back soon. Tomorrow will be the eighth day of the _Sophist_, and I'll write a post (or comment on someone else's post) about it (though it might be short).

Greetings from the mast.

Happy reading!

Day 48: Theaetetus 204d-208d (pgs. 227-231)

Today: technical discussion of the relationship between elements and complexes, and the beginning of a suggestion that knowledge involves a distinctive feature.

Happy reading!

Day 47: Theaetetus 200c-204d (p. 222-226)

A short note today about the ATB analysis of knowledge (knowledge = true judgment/belief + an account (logos)):

I found the notion of an account, here, to be rather difficult to make out. Socrates makes two suggestions, neither of which seems much connected to the idea of an account as giving a 'reason why,' much less a justification:

1. One of Socrates's suggestions is that that merely stating a proposition about something can constitute a logos of it, in the sense that someone would have in mind when she says that knowledge = true judgment + a logos. This strikes me as quite strange.

2. The second suggestion is that listing something's elements can be necessary, and might even be sufficient, for giving a logos of it. This seems to lead to a dilemma: either the supposed knowledge that we gain from composing these elements is suspect (we have no knowledge of the basic constituents, so how could they, alone, generate knowledge?), or our supposed knowledge cannot be given an account of (because it constitutes some kind of simple whole over and above its parts, and this simple whole will be, itself, unaccountable in virtue of its simplicity).

Clearly, some of these notions of logos reach back to the Cratylus, especially the comments about names and the relationship between names and accounts. But it struck me that this interpretation of ATB is quite different than what we are given in, e.g., Plato's Meno. So one question is: Is this the same ATB account of knowledge here as in the Meno? Even if it is, why exactly would Socrates think that these notions of logos somehow elevate true belief to the status of knowledge? (Notice that (2) above doesn't even require specifying a relation between the elements.) In any case, it seems to me that adopting a more sophisticated notion of a logosin this context would save the ATB account from the dilemma described above.

Happy reading, everyone!

Day 46: Theaetetus 196a-200c (p. 217-221)

Today we have yet another famous attempt to describe false judgment without falling into the problem of claiming that someone does not know what they know: namely, Socrates's aviary. One wonders how much Aristotle had this image in mind when developing his distinction between first and second actuality. After all, Aristotle's own distinction is frequently made in terms of knowledge, and knowing in different senses ...

Happy reading!

Day 44: Theaetetus 178a-191a (p. 207-211)

Today's highlights include many interesting, failed attempts to describe false judgment, and the account of thinking as talking to yourself.

Happy reading everyone!

Day 43: Theaetetus 182c-186e (pgs. 202-206)

No lack of things to write about today. I wonder how much scholarship has been based on these five pages...

(1) At 182c-d we get an interesting argument about flux, involving the insight that there is a problem in saying that X is in flux because constantly changing from F to G to H, etc.--the problem arises from the observation that F, G, and H themselves are in flux and thus cannot be identified / thought about / referred to any more than X can. (Am I getting this right?)

(2) At 183a-b we get the famous discussion of "thus and not thus"--famous in part because Aristotle echoes it repeatedly and prominently in Met. Γ 3-4. An interesting question is what kind of linguistic entity the "thus" there is supposed to be. If it is something like what we would call a "demonstrative," there are interesting questions about what objects and our mental states have to be like in order to apply demonstrative concepts to them. (I'm also reading this guy tonight.) But perhaps "thus" is rather just a placeholder for a noun?

(3) There's also a longer argument that perception could not be knowledge because it doesn't grasp the right kind of features. Truth depends on being, and knowing the truth depends on knowing being, and only the soul itself (not the soul through perception) can grasp being. When Socrates is introducing the idea that there are things (predicates? aspects?) that are only graspable by the soul, he draws from the special list of Forms from the Sophist and mentions being, one, same, and different (and possibly being two together, if that is a different thing [185b2]). But he eventually focuses on being for his argument that knowledge couldn't be perception. I'm curious whether and how well the argument would go through if he had substituted other items from that list for being, in the argument. (My gut reaction: it would still go through.) Also: is it possible to read that passage without thinking of M. Descartes and his wax?

Happy reading!

Day 42: Theaetetus 178a-182c (pgs. 197-201)

Two major parts of today's text: (a) Socrates draws out the impossible consequences of combining a Protagorean epistemology with the insight that knowledge ought to put us in a certain kind of state with respect to the future, and (b) more discussion of who holds "flux-y" views of the world, and how to adjudicate between those views and Parmenidean ones.

I'm not sure how much a devout Protagorean would be moved by Socrates's (a)-related arguments. Perhaps one could simply bite the bullet and say that we never know things about the future.

Small note: is it weird to classify alteration as motion (181d)? Doesn't Aristotle claim that other alterations reduce in some sense to motion?

Sorry for the scattered post. Happy reading!

Day 41: Theaetetus 172d-178a (p. 192-196)

Again, nothing profound today, just a confusion:

176a-177a: In this piece of text, Socrates seems to slide between two different conceptions of good and bad.

(1) "It is not possible, Theodorus, that evil should be destroyed - for there must always be something opposed to the good" (176a).

(2) "There are two patterns set up in reality. One is divine and supremely happy; the other has nothing of God in it ... This truth the evildoer does not see; blinded by folly and utter lack of understanding, he fails to perceive that the effect of his unjust practices is to make him grow more and more like the one, and less and less like the other" (176e-177a).

(1) appears to claim that badness is the positive opposite of the good, and this is why badness cannot be destroyed: where there is good, there will always also be badness. (2), however, suggests strongly that badness is a lack of goodness, of knowledge, of divinity. In this latter case, badness is not the actual opposite of goodness, and there is no reason why badness should always accompany goodness (i.e., goodness need not always bring with it a lack of goodness).

I don't have a diagnosis of the slide between these two views; I just wanted to point it out as we move into talking about relativism about goodness and badness. One of these two views might have more to offer a relativist than the other.

Happy reading!

Day 40: Theaetetus 168b-172d (p. 187-191)

I don't have anything profound to post today, just what is probably an obvious reflection on Socrates' objection to Protagoras at 169e-171c.

In this passage, Socrates accuses Protagoras's "man is the measure" doctrine of being self-contradictory. Because this purports to be a general claim about truth and falsity (that what is and is true for each person is just what appears to her to be and to be true), Socrates says that Protagoras must be committed to the following contradiction: His own Measure Doctrine will be both true and false, since it is true for him, but he admits it will be false for at least some others, and their view that it is false is equally true relative to them and their own appearances. So Protagoras will have to admit that both he and others are correct in their conflicting views about the Measure Doctrine.

Unless I'm missing something, this is a bad argument. If you're careful about relativizing each claim to the proper individual's perspective, there is no contradiction here. From Protagoras's perspective, he is right about the Measure Doctrine, and others are wrong. Of course, from the others' perspective, they are right that the Measure Doctrine is false, and Protagoras is wrong. But at least on the surface, relativism is entirely consistent with a certain kind of absolutism, even intolerance: Protagoras can vigorously assert and argue for his own general, relativistic theory (if that's what it is) without pain of contradiction precisely because, as a relativist, he acknowledges that he is bound by his own perspective on these things. If there is really no way of making someone else's truth your own, because we are each bound by our own "measure," then it must be that Protagoras means for his theory to be understood as being true for him. He can of course recognize that other perspectives might exist, but by his lights, these other perspectives are all incorrect. What is true in these other perspectives is true only for those people, and false for him, but by his own lights, he's right. So I don't think the self-refutation objection here is entirely successful.

(Note also that this meta-relativistic move doesn't threaten the generality of the Measure Doctrine: Protagoras can continue to claim that, by his (Protagoras's) lights, each person is the measure of his or her own truth and reality. And anyone who thinks differently is wrong.)

Happy reading!

Day 39: Theaetetus 163d-168a (pp. 182-186)

163d-164b: The argument from memories to the coming apart of perception and knowledge seems pretty weak. Socrates seems to be leaning heavily on a common notion of knowledge, i.e., when you remember something you know, you still know it. But couldn't Protagoras just swallow the result that you do not know things that you remember? Or, couldn't he just say that you know something different from the object that was the basis for your memory when you remember it? The second option would seem to mesh well with the relativistic account of perception from yesterday. I guess Socrates recognizes that in what follows, though, when he mimics Protagoras defending himself from 166b ff.

166d: The wise person is the one who can make good things appear for others rather than bad things. One might ask, "What determines if something is a good thing?" I suppose Protagoras might reply, "Well, the one having the appearance judges that it is good." So the wise person would be the one who, for someone experiencing something bad (where bad is cashed out as that person judging that the experience is bad), causes that person to have different appearances. Namely, ones that are good, where good is cashed out as that person judging that her experiences are good. Or does that not work?

167a: "...because the other state is better". Well, maybe Socrates' Protagoras has a different notion of good and bad in mind than the one I just proposed.

167c: "Whatever in any city is regarded as just and admirable is just and admirable in that city and for so long as that convention maintains itself; but the wise man replaces each pernicious convention by a wholesome one, making this both be and seem just." This is an absolutely baffling passage. Is Socrates' Protagoras bringing in the analogy/metaphor of the city-soul by saying that cities are merely people writ large, and that is why a city can have appearances and judgments? If man is the measure of all things, then shouldn't each individual in the city be the judge of what is just and admirable? Also, it seems that Socrates' Protagoras believes in an objective perniciousness, which does not seem to be coherent given the position sketched thus far.

Happy reading, everyone.

Day 38: Theaetetus 159a-163d (pp. 177-181)

160b: "yet we are tied neither to any other thing in the world nor to our respective selves". Is he saying that Socrates at T1 is not tied, in any respect, to Socrates at T2? I take the point he has been making earlier that, for example, in a strict sense, Socrates-ill and Socrates-well are two different people. But can they not be related in any way on this picture?

160b-c: Explicitly introducing the relativism inherent in the view.

161c-d: Animals are percipient. Things appear to animals in certain ways. Thus, the things are those ways for the animals. Thus, no man is a better judge than a tadpole. This seems to be the first counterargument against the view.

161d: "only the individual himself can judge of his own world". Is Socrates saying that people live in their own private worlds if Protagoras is correct?

161e-162a: "To examine and try to refute each other's appearances and judgments, when each person's are correct--this is surely an extremely tiresome piece of nonsense". I had an undergraduate professor who said this (quoted it, that is, as I learned a little later) to a student who was pressing relativism about truth. I have always liked it.

162b: Again, we have Socrates stating that good people should want to show off when he tells Theodorus that if he went to visit Spartan wrestling-schools, he should get naked and "take your turn of letting people see what you look like". It was their minds a couple days ago, and now it is their bodies. Theodorus, champion of modesty, is wonderful in his response.

Day 37: Theaetetus 154b-159a (p. 171-176)

A continuation of the "knowledge is perception" discussion.

156b: "For the perceptions we have such names as sight, hearing, smelling, feeling cold and feeling hot [oops: someone forgot taste!]; also what are called pleasures and pains, desires and fears"

I'm curious about what pleasure, pain, desire, and fear are doing here under the category of perception. This is neither an obvious classification, nor is it obviously Platonic doctrine (I'm thinking of pleasures and pains of anticipation in the Philebus, the pleasures of reason in Republic, and desire and fear as motivational states in Republic as well). So: why group these items together here?

One option is that the specific instances of these phenomena that Plato has in mind are perception-dependent states in one way or another: some desires and fears might have a perceptual component or a perceptual source, and some pleasures and pains could be very closely associated with certain perceptual experiences (say, the taste of chocolate). But then why not include other perception-dependent states as well, like perceptual beliefs whose content is derived from actual experiences? Or is some other criterion of "perception" or "perceptible" at work in creating the list?

Another problem is that, at least at this stage, it is not even clear that all of these items are truth-apt in the same way. If desires and fears, for instance, cannot be evaluated as true or false, we might rightly wonder: What are Plato's grounds for grouping them together with sense-perceptions in a dialogue about epistemology? Given the context, it seems especially strange to include these items in the claim that knowledge is perception.

Happy reading!

Day 36: Theaetetus 150a-154b (pgs. 167-171)

Big day. Midwifery, the what-is-knowledge question, and the beginning of Socrates' development of the knowledge-is-perception claim.

Anyone who has a more substantial post to make: please feel free to make it, and I'll delete this one. Happy reading!

Day 34: Theaetetus 142a-145d (pp. 157-161)

(1) 144a: "Along with a quickness beyond the capacity of most people, he has an unusually gentle temper; and, to crown it all, he is as manly a boy as nay of his fellows". This reminded me of Republic III, 410b and following in which Socrates describes the nature of a potential guardian.

(2) 145b: "And oughtn't the other [i.e., the person whose soul was being praised] to be very willing to show himself off?" Socrates says that someone with a good soul will be itching to have it examined. I guess I'm not immediately clear what the reason for this is.

Happy reading.

Day 33: Cratylus 440c-e

By now, we all know not to expect too much from Socrates' interlocutors. So I'm not going to belabor the point. But if Cratylus does indeed accept a Heraclitean metaphysics, why does he think there are natural names for things? If things have no stable natures, shouldn't we either (1) have an equally fluxy language, or (2) determine names by convention, and focus on the usefulness of names rather than their adequacy at corresponding with nature?

Day 32: _Cratylus_ 434e-440c (pgs. 151-155)

(1) We have a decision to make. The guidelines currently in place would have us reading half a page tomorrow and then continuing to the _Theaetetus_ Sunday. If people generally want to just finish off the _Cratylus_ today and start _Theaet._ tomorrow, that's fine with me. But unless I hear otherwise, I'll assume we'll stick with the first arrangement.

(2) 436d is very interesting. Our translator (Reeve) has: "The name-giver might have made a mistake at the beginning and then forced the other names to be consistent with it. There would be nothing strange in that. Geometrical constructions often have a small unnoticed error at the beginning with which all the rest is perfectly consistent." A few notes:

(i) "Geometrical constructions" here translates "tôn diagrammatôn." If I'm recalling correctly, Aristotle also refers to geometry this way--that is, Reeve is very right to treat "the diagrams" as a metonym of "geometry."

(ii) "Error" translates a form of "pseudos." Which is interesting because it restricts what Plato could mean by "consistent" (homologein). Falsehoods aren't consistent with anything, on many modern notions of consistency.

(iii) Socrates will follow this with a stern reminder to examine one's arkhai for acceptability.

(iv) Then he'll say that "if they [the arkhai] are adequately examined, the subsequent steps will plainly follow from them." We need to do at least a little work to make sense of this, because on a natural reading of what Socrates has just said, the very danger we're trying to avoid is that subsequent steps will follow from good and bad arkhai alike. We might just read 'follow' here to mean 'follow and be correct/true,' but that leaves the textual difficulty in place, because it looks like Socrates has just said that falsehoods can homologein with each other. Is Socrates introducing some kind of homologein / hepomai distinction here, or am I overlooking something obvious, or can one of you supply something clever?

(3) 435c: the sticky-ramp metaphor returns! Can we edit the old post to include the "sticky ramp" tag?

Happy reading, everyone.

Day 31: Cratylus 429d-434e (pp. 146-150)

431e-432a: Cratylus again says that if a name is altered slightly it becomes an entirely different name.

432a-c: Socrates' reply is that names are a type of image, which have sensory qualities. And images with sensory qualities admit of slight alterations without becoming an image of an entirely new object. This is because if an image duplicated all of the qualities of the thing of which it is an image, it would be a qualitatively identical copy of that thing and not an actual image of it.

433a-b: "I think we had better accept this, Cratylus, or else, like men lost on the streets of Aegina late at night, we, too, may incur the charge of truly seeming to be the sort of people who arrive at things later than they should" -- Uh, what? Anyone want to help me out with this?

Day 30: Cratylus 424a-429d (pp. 141-145)

Not much to say today. I just thought I would post to keep track of where we are.

428d: Self-deception is the worst thing of all, apparently.

429b: It seems like Cratylus is saying that a name either belongs to something totally or not at all. So it can't be the case that an object with the name X partially picks out the object's nature and partially does not. This doesn't seem right if names are simply images or imitations of the nature of an object. Images can be poorly rendered. No name will ever precisely match the nature of an object, or else it would simply be that object's nature.

Day 28: Cratylus 413c-418d (pp 131-135)

(1) 413e-414a. Courage opposes flows. But it doesn't oppose every flow--only those flows which are contrary to justice. Two points. First, it looks like courage is derivative on this account. It only acts in accordance with justice.

Second, I'm curious why courage is a virtue. Socrates says that "bad movement ... is a restrained or hindered motion" (415d), while virtue is possessed by a good sound which is "always unimpeded" and whose movement is "unrestrained and unhindered and so is always flowing" (415d). If the function of courage is opposing bad flows, and bad flows are flows which are restrained, then does courage simply slow down those bad flows even more? Or does the "opposition" take the form of breaking up the hindered flow? That is, to act in an opposite manner to vice would be to oppose the hindering of flow. I guess that's a better understanding.

(2) 414c. "Yes, Socrates, but getting it to do so is like trying to haul a boat up a very sticky ramp!" Well said, Hermogenes!

(3) 417b. "the good penetrates everything". I don't know what this means. Here are some options: the good is the cause of everything, the good is present in everything, the good is more powerful than everything, and the good controls everything.

I'm still with y'all! Happy reading, everyone!

Day 27: _Cratylus_ 407e-413c (pgs. 126-130)

At 408c Socrates says that "Speech ... has two forms: true and false," true speech dwelling with the gods and false speech dwelling with humans. At 385b we heard that "[statements] that say of the things that are that they are, are true, while those that say of the things that are that they are not, are false." A few half-baked thoughts:

(a) At 385 I wondered whether that definition would leave some statements as neither true nor false; the 408 passage makes me want to resist coming to that conclusion about 385.

(b) It is very hard to read 408 without thinking about Forms versus participants (unless, perhaps, one is not in the grip of a two-worlds reading of Plato). There is at least prima facie plausibility to the idea that if X fails somehow to be really real, it fails to license any true statements about it. But this gloss on 408 does not go well with 385, where both true and false statements are "of things that are."

(c) Why translate logos as "statement" at 385 and "speech" at 408? Surely, for Plato as well as for us, there are many kinds of speech that are not truth-evaluable (or are there?). I could be missing something obvious here--I haven't looked at the Greek carefully. And of course this is not a big deal: English has a sense of 'speech' that is narrower than all speech-acts. I'm just not entirely comfortable that I understand the basics of what is being talked about in these passages.

Happy reading!

Day 26: Cratylus 402d-407e

A few small notes today:

1. Socrates is clearly trying hard to link the gods' names to knowledge and truth as often as he can. Pluto/Hades is even a philosopher, and "a perfect sophist" (403e). Of course, we might simply conclude from this that Socrates is using these etymologies to forward his own, non-standard theological views. But in addition, this is an interesting example of how the 'truth' of names, once it is recognized, could radically change - and not merely reflect - our more substantive views of the world.

2. I find the Pluto/Hades etymology particularly interesting for what it presents as criteria for Pluto's/Hades's philosophical nature. Specifically, Pluto/Hades has knowledge of a psychological and ethical variety: he knows that desire, not force, is the greatest motivator (shades of Socrates here), and that what we desire most of all is to become better people. (Sidenote: the motivational comparison of force and desire is an interesting one, since standardly force is involuntary, and so not 'motivating' in the same sense as desire, which is in some sense voluntary).

Happy reading!

Day 25: Cratylus 397d-402d

A few (slightly ranty) puzzles about the names of the gods: If we can know so little about the gods and their natures (400d-401a), wouldn't it be best not to name them at all? There is perhaps the need to use some language to refer to them in prayer, if that is required by your religion, but why give them names? Are names that are not intended to capture the nature of the named thing really names at all? From what we have seen earlier in the dialogue, there is perhaps good reason to think that these are not really names (just as a broken shuttle isn't really a shuttle). Or perhaps they are simply false names? In any case, there's something a bit troubling about Socrates giving etymologies of the gods' names immediately after admitting that they are neither (a) like the gods' names for themselves, nor (b) can the names we give them capture their natures, since "we admit that we know nothing about the gods."

Happy reading!

Day 24: _Cratylus_ 392b-397c (pgs. 111-115)

Happy reading, everyone!

Day 23: 'Cratylus' 385d-392b (pp. 106-110)

388a ff: S argues that a name is a sort of a tool. Does this mean that names can be excellent, i.e., have aretê? Cf. Resp. 352e-353a.

388e: what's the craft that S is talking about at this point? Is it the craft of using names, or the craft of setting the rules that govern the proper use of names? (Or something else?) One good reason to think that it is not the first option is that there are lots of people who can use names. (Perhaps it is the craft of using names correctly.) But one good reason to think that it is not the second option is that if only the rule-setter can set the rules that govern the proper use of names, then it looks like an instructor--presumably, an instructor who teaches a student what things are called, etc.--does not possess the craft of setting the rules.

Perhaps that outcome isn't as odd or objectionable as I first thought ...

Day 22: Cratylus 383a-385c (pp. 101-105)

Nothing philosophically adventurous from me today. I just raise a few questions about this difficult dialogue.

383a: Cratylus's position: For each thing, there is a name that correctly belongs to it "naturally". "Naturally" seems to be cashed out as being "the same for everyone".

384b: "But as I've heard only the one-drachma course...". I take it that he's being sarcastic, right?

384c-d: Hermogenes's position is a little less clear to me. Is it that each thing has a correct name, but its correctness is simply a function of people agreeing to use that name for the thing? That seems to be suggested by "the correctness of names is determined by ... convention and agreement" and "No name belongs to a particular thin gby nature, but only because of the rules and usage of those who establish the usage and call it by that name". So, he is not an eliminativist about the "correctness" of names. Rather, he's a relativist.

385d: "So whatever each person says is the name of something, for him, that is its name?" -- The relativism applies to individuals and not just communities.

386e: "And if things are of such a nature, doesn't the same hold of actions performed in relation to them? Or aren't actions included in some one class of the things that are?" Actions are included in the things that are-existentially? So, actions exist? Or, is there a veridical reading of this sentence such that he means that actions are true?

387a-c: Each action has a nature such that there is a natural way to do it. For example, there is a natural way to cut and burn something which will lead to successful cutting and burning. Speaking is an action. Therefore, there is a natural way to speak which will lead to successful speaking. I'm still unsure on why we're granting that there is a natural way to perform all actions, but OK.

385c: "Is a whole statement true but not its parts? -No, the parts are also true."

What is a statement and what are its parts? A proposition and its subject and predication?

Day 21: Phaedo 116d-118a (pgs. 99-100)

Not much to read today. We can all somberly meditate on Socrates' death and prepare for the Cratylus.

Happy reading!

Day 20: Phaedo 109c-116d

Two short notes today:

It is interesting that, in Socrates' picture of the afterlife, wrongdoers can only be relieved of torment and punishment by persuading their own victims that they should be released (114a-b). If the punishment is just and correct in the first place, what reasons would properly persuade someone to cease the punishment? Is this persuasion rational argument, or mere pleading? Is Socrates perhaps looking forward to Meletus, Anytus, et. al. trying to persuade him that they ought to be relieved of their punishment? (Has Socrates ever been convinced by anyone's arguments about anything? The afterlife for his accusers doesn't look too rosy ... perhaps this is Socrates' idea of revenge?)

Also, poor Crito ...

Day 19: Phaedo 103b-109c

Enjoy untangling the relationship between deathlessness and life in 105c-d ff.!

Happy reading, everyone!

Day 18: Phaedo 96d-103-b (pgs. 84-88)

First, my apologies to IanH for accidentally burying his very fine contribution yesterday under my longest-yet post.

Lots of action today : Socrates's intellectual biography, some theorizing of Forms, and discussion of the method of hypothesis. Rereading this part of the text, I am even more convinced by Wolfsdorf's view (which I think he shares with others) that 'hypothesis' is an inappropriate translation of hupothesis. The former connotes, or possibly denotes, too much in the way of arbitrariness, conjecture, and haphazard (possibly 'intuitive' or 'speculative') formulation. Wolfsdorf, if I recall correctly, suggests that 'foundation' gets much closer to the meaning of the Greek. It certainly does not appear here that the hypothesis is something that is merely hypothesized, in the modern sense. I would defend this claim at greater length, but I've never managed to do so in fewer than 1000 words, and I'm exhausted.

Also, I probably didn't do justice to Wolfsdorf's very nice paper, which I recommend.

Happy reading, everyone!

Day 17: Phaedo 91a-96c (pgs. 79-83)

*****WARNING*****

I think I'll have to reread tonight's material, having had a quite seriously wrong picture of psychic harmony in mind as I was reading. The translation in the Cooper edition (Grube's) consistently, when Socrates and his interlocutors are thinking through the consequences of the soul's being a harmony, refers to a harmony of elements. Now, 'element' usually translates stoikheion, which is often a very specialized, technical term--Aristotle, at Met. Γ (1014a), lists uses of the term, and it is quite clear that its range is far narrower than simply 'constituent' or 'part.' A central--perhaps, depending who you ask, the central--use of the term is for the letter of a word; also, it is no accident that Euclid's treatise is the 'ΣΤΟΙΧΕΙΑ', because the term also (it seems) standardly referred to an important basic proof that was used as a component of other, more complex proofs.

The point is that to say that something is composed out of, or arises from relations between and among, stoikheia is quite different to say that something is a composition or a relation or product of a relation, simpliciter. Yet I haven't found any place where what Grube renders 'harmony of elements' actually translates the Greek stoikheion. I haven't checked all the instances--there are plenty!--but what I've seen in the Greek is either pragma or a pronoun.

There is one particularly interesting and important sentence, at 92b, where the pronoun Grube is translating with 'these elements' in fact seems to refer to 'the εἶδος and σῶμα of a person.' I haven't looked at the sentence carefully enough to be sure of that, but that would be (i) pretty interesting and (ii) not at all in the range of what is usually meant by 'element.'

So, if you haven't done the reading yet, I'd recommend spending a little extra energy trying to remain neutral, when Socrates speaks of harmony, on the questions of (i) what the harmony is a harmony of and (ii) what kind of composition or relation the harmony is.

*****END WARNING*****

One other note: when Simmias says at 92a that he would be 'very surprised' if he ever changed his opinion, the verb there is an optative of θαυμάζω, which I think is an important verb in Plato. If I recall correctly, in the Platonic statement that 'philosophy begins in wonder,' the 'wonder' is a form of θαῦμα.

Anyway, in our translation it appears that Simmias would be surprised if he changed his mind about one thing, but Socrates has just listed a set of statements. What exactly is Simmias saying he would be surprised about? (The abandonment of the whole view, or of some specific thesis?) Similar questions apply to Cebes.

In short: I'm just not sure what the dialectical function of those comments is.

Day 17: Phaedo 91a-96c

I'm back, feeling better, and caught up.

92c: "How will you harmonize this statement with your former one?" Good one, S.

93a: A composite cannot be in a different "state" than its elements. What does "state" mean in this passage? If it's just a general term for quality or property, the principle seems prima facie false.

93b: One soul can't be more of a soul than another soul.

93c ff: Socrates seems to be taking very seriously the suggestion that a good soul is in harmony while an evil soul lacks harmony. It doesn't look like it's just an analogy for him.

94b-c: The soul opposes the affections of the body, e.g., the body is hungry and the soul prevents it from eating. Quite a different picture than Republic IV in which the soul is responsible both for the desire to eat and the desire not to eat.

Have a good night, everyone!

Day 16: Phaedo 84c-91a

Somehow I always forget just how philosophically dense the Phaedo is. Just one fairly obvious thought today: The explicitly uncertain/conjectural status of the argument is very striking. At 85c we read: “One should achieve one of these things: learn the truth about these things and find it for oneself, or, if that is impossible, adopt the best and most irrefutable of men’s theories, and, borne upon this, sail through the dangers of life as upon a raft, unless someone should make that journey safer and less risky upon a firmer vessel of divine doctrine.” There’s an interesting comparison with Neurath’s boat here…

Happy reading, everyone.

Day 14: Phaedo 73b-78c

One small remark, and a related small question:

73c ff.: In this passage, perception seems to be quite a complex psychological event. Plato twice emphasizes that comparative thoughts about sizes and shapes arise directly from sense perception, and that these comparative thoughts themselves already involve reference to the Forms. (Clearly, we are not supposed to be literally perceiving the Forms, or the Forms in things, but our knowledge of the Forms informs our perception to a high degree.) For instance, Plato asks, "Whence have we acquired the knowledge of [the Equal itself]? Is it not from the things we mentioned just now, from seeing sticks or stones or some other things that are equal ...?" (74b). And again a few lines later, he says: "it is definitely from the equal things, though they are different from that Equal, that you have derived and grasped the knowledge of equality" (74c).

My question is: Just how much is going on in perception here? On one reading, this passage tells us we literally see equality and inequality in particular things, and that this is only possible because perception involves some small bit of recollection (which must mean that perception happens against a background of rational thought). On a more minimal reading, Plato is only saying that perception gives us the material for comparative judgments of equality (for instance), and that recollection is involved at the level of judgment. But if the latter, then why all the emphasis on perception as, itself, the first stimulus or occasion for recollection? (Secondary question: What might the role of the Forms in sense-perception tell us about the so-called "Two Worlds Doctrine" debate?)

Day 13: Phaedo 67e-73b

A note from Nate:

68c-d: We get a discussion of self-restraint that is remarkable both in its own right and in comparison with the _Rep._ passage. Here too there is at least a hint of the Socratic puzzlement at the very notion of self-restraint. Here of course Socrates is less Plato's Socrates, so a motivational monist, so the problem of making any sense of the idea is even sharper...

68d: As translated this appears to be an argument from contradiction.

69a-b: Compare of course the Prot. discussion of the metretic art.

Interlude

Congrats to Nate and Christiana!!! Forget reading Plato. Celebrate!

Day 11: Phaedo 57a-62a (pp. 49-54)

At 59a Phaedo says that when he was with Socrates he experienced a feeling of "an unaccustomed mixture of pleasure and pain at the same time". However, at 60b Socrates claims that one cannot have both pleasure and pain at the same time, but instead there is an "astonishing" relation between the two opposites in which if one catches one, one will also catch the other "like two creatures with one head".

I'm trying to picture what two creatures with one head would look like--one head and two bodies? Wouldn't that just be one creature with two bodies? Wouldn't a more apt simile be something like "like one creature with two heads"? I suppose if pleasure and pain were like that, then one might be able to isolate pleasure without pain or vice versa (by cutting off a head?), and Socrates's point is that one can't have one without the other, which would follow if they shared a head. I know this talk of the relationship between opposites comes up later in the dialogue. I'd like to revisit this passage when it does.

Day 10: Crito 53c-54e (pp. 47-48)

Not much reading today.

(1) 53c-d: Either (a) life is not worth living in a poorly governed city or (b) Socrates's particular life is not worth living in a poorly governed city. I'm inclined to see it as (b), but what is peculiar to Socrates's style of living that would make life in a poorly governed city not worth living? Socrates goes on to say that it would be "unseemly" (ἀσχήμων -- LSJ says it could also be "shameful") to continue discussing the virtues with people in his new home. Would it be unseemly because his new city would be poorly governed, or because Socrates' escape from Athens would somehow make his attempts discuss the virtues fraudulent, or both?

If I don't chime in tomorrow, I will have done the reading. I will just be out of town, and I'm not sure if I will have internet access.

Day Nine: Crito 47c-53b (pp. 42-46)

Is there any way to follow the many other than with fear? -- "should we follow the opinion of the many and fear it ..." (47d). Couldn't you follow the many happily? Two points of comparison here (both from the Republic) are S's metaphor of the many as a beast who is handled, poorly, by the sophists (Resp. 493a) and S's claim that the philosopher who returns to the cave runs the risk of being killed by the ignorant (Resp. 517a).

49b: one must not inflict wrong in return for wrong. I suppose that this is compatible with both not returning harm when harmed, and also with punishing wrongdoers, since a punishment inflicted on a bad person can be corrective, and therefore cannot be a wrong or a harm. (Cf. the discussion in the Gorgias, where S suggests that the worst thing that you can do to a vicious person is to leave them alone--does it follow from this that a virtuous person cannot let a vicious person go unpunished ... since that would be to harm them?)

50e: "... you are our offspring and servant"--'servant' here translates δοῦλος, which I believe can also be translated as "slave". Nice.
 
53a-b: Sparta and Crete--it is Crete that is idealized in the Laws, is it not? What about Megara and Thebes? Any mention of those two in any other dialogues?

Day 8: Crito 43a-47c (pp. 37-42)

On to the Crito! A couple of small points:

(1) 44c-d: Crito claims that the majority are able to inflict the greatest of evils--presumably death. Socrates dismisses this suggestion and then says that if the majority could inflict the greatest evils, they would also be capable of the greatest good. Does this relate to Pryio's discussion of the Apology from a few days ago (ref: 24d-ish), where Socrates seems to imply that one who knows who corrupts the young also knows who improves the young? The thought goes something like this: If someone knows what is good for X, she also knows what is bad for X, and if one knows how to inflict the greatest of evils on a person, one also knows how to inflict the greatest goods on that person.

Also, what are the greatest good and the greatest evil, for that matter?

(2) 47a: "one must not value all the opinions of men, but some and not others, nor the opinions of all men, but those of some and not of others". This is a weird formulation of the principle. On first reading, I thought he was saying that one should value some of the opinions of some of the men, which doesn't seem to be what the principle actually says.

Day 7: Apology 34a-42a

38a: With all this talk of testing and provoking others, and the crucial shift in priorities that Socrates is uniquely able to bring to the other Athenians, it is a relief to hear Socrates admit that what he's really doing is "testing myself and others." But in what sense does Socrates test himself? When do we find him doing this? Do his discussions with others count as tests for himself, and if so, do they test himself in the same way as they test others? Is this part of what Socrates' human wisdom consists in, namely, the ability to reflexively test and examine himself?

Day 6: Apology 26d-34a (p26-30)

Hello all,

I shall try keep up with you and post when I have something to say.

I have one small question today. Socrates at c32b announces that he will now give a great proof of his claim that a man who fights for justice must lead a private, not a public life. Socrates begins by saying that "the things that I shall tell you are commonplace and smack of the lawcourts". Does Socrates here suggest that he has experience of the lawcourts? At 17d he tells us that this trial is his first appearance in a lawcourt. Socrates had never been on trial before, but would he qua Athenian citizen not have spent some time in the lawcourts? So how knowledgeable are we meant to think that Scorates was regarding the working of the lawcourts?

Day 5: Apology 22b-26d (pgs. 22-26)

Thanks to everyone for yesterday's comments. Two brief, unremarkable comments.

(a) Knowledge-standards seem to be shifting here (or, perhaps, Socrates is talking about two kinds of knowledge). On the one hand, he is happy to say of all sorts of people that they don't know anything. On the other hand, he says, e.g., at 22d-e that craftsmen have knowledge of their crafts. I haven't checked whether this is marked by a difference in the Greek verb.

(b) At 25d-e note the argument that establishes, or presupposes, that nobody does (certain kinds of) wrong willingly.

Day 4: Apology 17a-22a (pgs. 17-23)

Dialogue #2! Great material about which I have little to say.

(a) At 17c Socrates says that he will defend himself with "things spoken at random." Two questions arise. (i) Is this phrase supposed to contrast with the accusers' "embroidered and stylized phrases" (17c), some other standard way of speaking in court (perhaps suggested in 17d), or both? (ii) The 'random' here is Grube's rendering of εἰκῇ, which the LSJ says has a primary meaning of "without a plan," and which the LSJ also says appears at Protagoras 326d. It would be interesting to sort out the connection Socrates sees between speaking justly (or being just, or having the whole truth) and being able to speak without a plan.

(b) At 20a-b we get an identification of human excellence on the analogy of the sort of excellence in a horse one would expect to get from a horse-breeder. NB that the question is raised whether training by sophists conduces to development of this kind of excellence, and that Socrates speaks of it as a matter of "excelling in their proper qualities."

Happy reading, everyone.

Day 3: The end of the Euthyphro

I have just one question (or complaint) about today's text.

15d: Socrates repeats something he brought up at the beginning of the dialogue: "If you had no clear knowledge of piety and impiety you would never have ventured to prosecute your old father for murder on behalf of a servant. For fear of the gods you would have been afraid to take the risk lest you should not be acting rightly ..."

Apart from the dramatic effects of these sorts of comments, they also seem to have a strange philosophical upshot. This is only an impression, but it seems to me that Socrates is here trying to apply what is usually an epistemic principle to the practical sphere. We are usually told that we should not believe something unless we are absolutely sure it is true. (And we should probably also have the occasional Socratic discussion in order to root out those rash, false beliefs that we inevitably acquire in daily life.) But in the passage above, we are now also being told that we should not act as if something is true unless we are absolutely sure it is true.

Obviously, the second, practical principle does not follow directly from the first, epistemic one. So what justifies it? It is not the same as the principle that we should act from knowledge of what is best (whenever we can), since this kind of principle doesn't automatically recommend against acting when you don't have knowledge. Perhaps we should refrain from assenting in cases in which assent might produce a false belief; but why should we refrain from acting unless we have knowledge?

Day 2.

Today, Euthyphro 6c-11b(ish) (pages 6-10 in Cooper). A few notes, about the mechanics of the project and about the text:

(i) Ian will be joining us, which is awesome.

(ii) Ian thinks that the (italicized) introductions to each dialogue should count as part of the day's five pages. They certainly take time to read, and the idea to read five pages a day came by considering the total length of the volume, not excluding the introductions. So, unless there are protests, we can retroactively declare yesterday's reading to have ended at 6c, and today's at 11b.

(iii) At 9d Socrates says that he "will not insist on this point; let us assume, if you wish, that..." Given that any instance of something's being granted or posited for the sake of argument in Plato deserves some attention, I took a quick look at the Greek, and the 'assume' here appears to be a use of ἀφίημι, which the LSJ says has a primary meaning of 'let go of.'

(iv) For whatever it's worth, the Greek text available at perseus.tufts.edu has a couple instances of Euthyphro's name in that speech of Socrates's (9c-d) that our Cooper translator (G.M.A. Grube) has not preserved in the English. Perhaps there is a textual issue here that I'm not aware of.

(v) At 10a, when Socrates says that "there is something loved and--a different thing--something loving," the "things" translate pronouns, not (say) pragma. (I've got this book on the brain.)

Happy reading!

....And we're off.

Today: Euthyphro 2a-7d(ish). (Do the introductions count as part of the 5 pages or not?)

Very brief thoughts:

(a) It's nice to begin with such familiar material.

(b) The substance of the court case--that is, the story of what Euthyphro's father did--is even more complicated than I recalled.

(c) I'd remembered that Socrates says that the subjects we get hostile when we disagree about are justice, beauty, and the good; I hadn't remembered that he says that this is (in part?) because in other cases we can simply resort to measurement (7c). I wonder if anything interesting can be said comparing this to the discussion of the metretic art at Protagoras 356a-357c?

Happy reading.