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.