Happy reading, everyone.
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
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…
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Nate: The passage you mention is interesting, and it seems to me to be connected to the warnings Socrates later gives against becoming misologues (or misanthropes). 90b-c: "Misanthropy comes when a man ... has placed great trust in someone and believes him to be altogether truthful, sound, and trustworthy; then, a short time afterwards he finds him to be wicked and unreliable, and ... one comes to hate all men and to believe that no one is sound in any way at all." Transferring this lesson to the case misology: On the one hand, we might have to be satisfied with something less than absolute certainty that our theory is true, which might seem sub-optimal in some sense; but on the other hand, believing something merely plausible - as being merely plausible - might prevent us from becoming misologues, and so, might actually be beneficial in a sense.
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