Happy reading!
Friday, February 25, 2011
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."
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hm, nice post. (What happened to all that epistemic modesty, Socrates?)
ReplyDeleteInteresting note about Anaxagoras at 400a: Socrates is willing at least here to say not that he cited, as the correct cause of everything, not _nous_ but "_nous_ and soul." (Were the two equivalent, for Anaxagoras? I sure don't know.)
Nate: Good point. What seems to be important about _nous_ for Anaxagoras is that it is an active, organizing cause. I'm not sure what would hang on its being a psychic (as opposed to a physical?) cause. I hate to say it, but is this maybe Socrates being a sloppy historian?
ReplyDeleteSounds plausible to me.
ReplyDeleteInteresting point about "nous" & "psukhê": Aristotle says that Anax himself was unclear about the issue (DA 404b1).
ReplyDeleteThough right before that, Ar. says that Anax said that soul is the cause of motion, "as does anyone else who says that nous moves the universe". So from that passage, it might look as though all of the explicit Anaxagorean texts in front of Aristotle said "nous does it", and Aristotle was just inferring that this commits him to saying "soul does it".
A quick glance at the fragments looks as though Anaxagoras uses 'psukhê' only of humans and earthly animals, e.g. frag. 4 and frag 12. Again, frag 12 might be ambiguous:
"and everything that has soul, both the greater things and the lesser things, nous controls them."