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!
Great post, Colfert.
ReplyDeleteI had a longer post typed out, but Blogger ate it. I might generally recommend composing in a word processor and copy/pasting into Blogger.
That said, it's probably a stroke of luck that that happened, because it's late at night and my ideas now are probably wind-eggs. The rough idea is this:
It takes some real work to even make philosophically respectable the idea of the same thing being found by different processes of collection and division. Plato probably understood, better than Butler, Butler's dictum that everything is what it is and not another thing. If the P part of F is going to be the same as the P' part of F', why isn't it the case that F = F' and P = P'? (Especially if we take the items under discussion in the collection/division discussions to stand in for full-blooded Platonic Forms--and how could they not?)
Of course there are things to say here. My point now is just perhaps that the apparatus we need to say what needs to be said here is apparatus we get _in the Sophist itself_.
Also, Colfert's post makes me want to organize a reading group about the literature on whether/to what extent the Greeks had a notion of subjectivity.
ReplyDeleteThere's a bit in the principle of non-contradiction part of _Met. Γ_ where Aristotle wrestles with the fact that Homer reports Hector as undergoing _allophronesis_. The line struck me as curious because, if Aristotle is not relying on the fact that all parties would agree that _phronesis_ is truth-entailing, it's hard to see why this fact would be worth mentioning in a discussion of PNC. Hmm...
On to the _Statesman_!