Plato develops a single coherent worldview. The need to give a detailed elaboration of practical proposals as tests for theories. Note: There exist a number of spurious dialogues and dialogues whose authenticity is questioned by many serious scholars.
The above is based on Robert S. Senior McLuhan Fellow. They are provided through the Perseus project at Tufts University. Proceed to the next section. The soul of a good man who has led a pure life goes " It is a happy fate, released from uncertainty and fears.
But the souls of the wicked or impure are "compelled to wander about these places [on earth] as punishment Or because of their craving for the corporeal, they may be reincarnated as base animals such as the donkey. No soul which has not practiced philosophy, and is not absolutely pure when it leaves the body, may attain to the divine nature; that is only for the lover of wisdom. Philosophy sets the soul free, rid of human ills. Pleasure and pain are impure, corporeal, and bind the soul like rivets to the body.
Socrates compares his expression of joy at his impending death to that shown by the dying swan [the swan song], which sings most loudly and sweetly then in anticipation of going into the presence of the gods, and not as an expression of grief. But Simmias is still unconvinced of the immortality of the soul.
He addresses several concerns. Socrates loves to argue. He also refutes the concept of souls wearing out He acknowledges he in unsuited to pursue natural science.
He does not "understand how things becomes one, nor, in short, why anything else comes or ceases or continues to be, according to this method of inquiry. He distrusts observational sciences: "I was afraid that by observing objects with my eyes and trying to comprehend them with each of my senses I might blind my soul altogether" as can occur by watching an eclipse.
He gives his own theory of causation: "I am assuming the existence of absolute beauty and goodness Whatever else is beautiful apart from absolute beauty is beautiful because it partakes of that absolute beauty The one thing that makes that object beautiful is the presence in it or association with in it, in whatever way the relation comes about, of absolute beauty. Socrates proves the immortality of the soul by claiming that absolute forms do not coexist with their opposites: the soul confers life, the opposite of life is death, thus the soul will not admit death and is therefore immortal.
Souls are imperishable, but nonetheless must be cared for in life and for all time--the only escape from evil is becoming good. Socrates describes his theory of the earth. The earth, if spherical, is in the middle of the heavens aether , and being suspended in equilibrium requires no force to keep it from falling.
It is vast, and there are many hollow places in which water, mist, and air collect and in which we ordinary humans actually live, though we incorrectly believe we live on the surface and that the air we see about us is the true heavens.
The earth and stones we are surrounded by are corroded, not like the true earth and heaven, which are out of sight. The idealized real earth has more vivid and extensive colors than what we experience, and the trees, flowers, mountains, stones, etc. Rich metals are abundant. Idealized humans live in the air beyond our sight , free from disease and superior in their senses to us. They have temples inhabited by gods and see the true sun, moon and stars as they really are.
The hollows that we live in are interconnected by underground channels, subterranean rivers of water, mud, and lava, and these flows have a natural oscillation. The largest cavity in the earth is Tartarus, into which all the great rivers flow and reemerge again in a type of oscillation accompanied by great winds. The great streams include: 1 the mightiest, Oceanus, 2 Acheron which arrives at the Acherusian Lake where the souls of the dead come , 3 Pryriphlegethon which belches forth jets of lava , and 4 the Cocytus river which forms the lake Styx in the Stygian region.
The newly dead are submitted to judgement. Those who lived a neutral life go to Acheron for purification and absolution from sins. The very wicked receive eternal punishment in Tartarus and never reemerge. Redeemable sinners stay in Tartarus for a year, then are borne by the river to the Acherusian Lake etc.
But those who have lived holy lives "are released and set free from confinement in these regions of the earth, and passing upward to their pure abode, make their dwelling upon the earth's surface [i. Living a life of self-control and goodness, courage, and liberality and truth is the way a man can be free from all anxiety about the fate of the soul. He should devote himself to the pleasures of acquiring knowledge.
Crito asks if he has any words for his children, but he has no new advice. He is indifferent to whether his body is buried or burned, since his soul will have departed it to a state of heavenly happiness.
His 3 sons come in with the women of his household, and after speaking to them a short while asks them to go away. His kindly jailer gives him praise, apologizes for having to carry out his orders, and leaves weeping.
Crito wants him to delay as long as possible, but Socrates insists on proceeding with the execution. A servant fetches the cup of hemlock, which Socrates calmly and cheerfully drinks. He urges Apollodorus to cease his weeping and be brave, since he wishes to die in tranquility.
He tells Crito they should offer a cock to the divine healer Asclepius as if he were recovering from an illness by dying. Soon he dies. I am a lover of learning, and trees and open country won't teach me anything, whereas men in the town do. Phaedrus reads Lysias' speech, which describes how a handsome young man is tempted, not by the entreaty of a lover but by one who professes not to be in love, arguing that "a lover more often than not wants to possess you One is the innate desire for pleasure, the other an acquired judgment that aims us at what is best.
Sometimes these internal guides are in accord, sometimes at variance When judgment guides us rationally toward what is best, and has the mastery, that mastery is called temperance A man dominated by desire and enslaved to pleasure is of course bound to aim at getting the greatest possible pleasure out of his beloved He must aim at making the boy totally ignorant and totally dependent on his lover, by way of securing the maximum pleasure for himself, and the maximum of damage to the other.
But Socrates then maintains that love eros is a god or divine being and cannot therefore be evil. He cites Stesichorus' belief that love "is a gift of the gods," a heaven-sent form of madness or possession. He argues that the soul is immortal and is like a chariot drawn by two differing steeds: "one of them is noble and good, When it is perfect and winged it journeys on high and controls the whole world, but one that has shed its wings sinks down until it can fasten on something solid, and settling there it takes itself an earthly body It is there that true being dwells, without color or shape, that cannot be touched; reason alone, the soul's pilot, can behold it, and all true knowledge is knowledgee thereof Contemplating truth she is nourished and prospers And while she is borne round she discerns justice He and he alone becomes truly perfect.
Standing aside from the busy doings of mankind, and drawing nigh to the divine, he is rebuked by the multitude as being out of his wits When he that loves beauty is touched by such madness he is called a lover Beauty it was ours to see in all its brightness in those days When a beloved causes desire in a lover, the driver of the chariot reins in the base horse "until the evil steed casts off his wantonness In Plato scholarship, dialogues are divided into early, middle, and late.
Early dialogues. My AOS is not Plato, but the basic gist is that early may be closer to what we believe Socrates himself might have done and said i. Let's call this "the Plato-washing of Socrates. Hence the meeting of Parmenides with a young Socrates, teaching Plato's theory of forms, cannot be historical.
Even when the dialogues are fictitious, some of the interlocutors in Plato's dialogues are historical, e. But we do not know, whether such a meeting actually took place and whether the participants hold their speeches as recorded by Plato.
Usually Plato lets others express his own philosophical thoughts and claims, most notably Socrates. Plato's work with the highest probability for historical truth is the Apology, with the two speeches of Socrates. As JoWehler notes, the dialogues are fictitious compositions, though often with real people, including, I believe, two of Plato' brothers in the Republic.
Some passages from Socrates can be compared with Xenophon's works, but it is good to remember that what we possess is only a tiny fragment of ancient writings, and I think it would be very difficult for scholars to cross-reference works and judge accuracy. Even the near-contemporary historians Herodotus and Thucydides, who ostensibly aimed for accuracy, are assumed to have partially fabricated public speeches they attribute to Pericles and other political leaders.
However, the period still bore many traces of oral culture. It is almost certain that the Greeks had far better memories for long speeches, poems, and dialogues than we do today. So it is possible that large chunks of dialogue were passed down with fewer errors than we might imagine. Grube, in Five Dialogues by Plato , indicates that it's likely that the Apology , at least, is at least somewhat faithful to what Socrates actually said, given that Plato is believed to have written it not long after Socrates' trial, and it would have not gone over well had his account been drastically different from others' recollections of what Socrates had said.
It's worth noting that no less an authority than Plato's most famous pupil Aristotle classified his dialogs as "fiction. Plato's aim was to teach philosophy, not record history and he's on record as endorsing the alteration or wholesale invention of "facts" to suit philosophical or pedagogical goals.
Since Plato himself does not appear as a character in his own dialogs, we can assume he's not recording conversations where he was himself present.
In order for them to be accurate, therefore, Socrates would have needed to have accurately recounted these conversations to Plato, who would then have also needed to remember them accurately for in some cases quite a long period of time before writing them down. But there are many signs in such works as Meno , Phaedo , Republic , and Phaedrus that point in the opposite direction.
And the great admiration Plato feels for Socrates is also evident from his Apology. The reader is given every encouragement to believe that the reason why Socrates is successful in persuading his interlocutors on those occasions when he does succeed is that his arguments are powerful ones. The reader, in other words, is being encouraged by the author to accept those arguments, if not as definitive then at least as highly arresting and deserving of careful and full positive consideration.
When we interpret the dialogues in this way, we cannot escape the fact that we are entering into the mind of Plato, and attributing to him, their author, a positive evaluation of the arguments that his speakers present to each other.
There is a further reason for entertaining hypotheses about what Plato intended and believed, and not merely confining ourselves to observations about what sorts of people his characters are and what they say to each other. When we undertake a serious study of Plato, and go beyond reading just one of his works, we are inevitably confronted with the question of how we are to link the work we are currently reading with the many others that Plato composed.
Admittedly, many of his dialogues make a fresh start in their setting and their interlocutors: typically, Socrates encounters a group of people many of whom do not appear in any other work of Plato, and so, as an author, he needs to give his readers some indication of their character and social circumstances. But often Plato's characters make statements that would be difficult for readers to understand unless they had already read one or more of his other works.
For example, in Phaedo 73a-b , Socrates says that one argument for the immortality of the soul derives from the fact that when people are asked certain kinds of questions, and are aided with diagrams, they answer in a way that shows that they are not learning afresh from the diagrams or from information provided in the questions, but are drawing their knowledge of the answers from within themselves. That remark would be of little worth for an audience that had not already read Meno.
Several pages later, Socrates tells his interlocutors that his argument about our prior knowledge of equality itself the form of equality applies no less to other forms—to the beautiful, good, just, pious and to all the other things that are involved in their asking and answering of questions 75d.
Laches : what is courage? Charmides : What is moderation? Hippias Major : what is beauty? Evidently, Plato is assuming that readers of Phaedo have already read several of his other works, and will bring to bear on the current argument all of the lessons that they have learned from them.
In some of his writings, Plato's characters refer ahead to the continuation of their conversations on another day, or refer back to conversations they had recently: thus Plato signals to us that we should read Theaetetus , Sophist , and Statesman sequentially; and similarly, since the opening of Timaeus refers us back to Republic , Plato is indicating to his readers that they must seek some connection between these two works.
These features of the dialogues show Plato's awareness that he cannot entirely start from scratch in every work that he writes.
He will introduce new ideas and raise fresh difficulties, but he will also expect his readers to have already familiarized themselves with the conversations held by the interlocutors of other dialogues—even when there is some alteration among those interlocutors.
Meno does not re-appear in Phaedo ; Timaeus was not among the interlocutors of Republic. Why does Plato have his dominant characters Socrates, the Eleatic visitor reaffirm some of the same points from one dialogue to another, and build on ideas that were made in earlier works? If the dialogues were merely meant as provocations to thought—mere exercises for the mind—there would be no need for Plato to identify his leading characters with a consistent and ever-developing doctrine.
For example, Socrates continues to maintain, over a large number of dialogues, that there are such things as forms—and there is no better explanation for this continuity than to suppose that Plato is recommending that doctrine to his readers.
Furthermore, when Socrates is replaced as the principal investigator by the visitor from Elea in Sophist and Statesman , the existence of forms continues to be taken for granted, and the visitor criticizes any conception of reality that excludes such incorporeal objects as souls and forms. The Eleatic visitor, in other words, upholds a metaphysics that is, in many respects, like the one that Socrates is made to defend.
Again, the best explanation for this continuity is that Plato is using both characters—Socrates and the Eleatic visitor—as devices for the presentation and defense of a doctrine that he embraces and wants his readers to embrace as well. This way of reading Plato's dialogues does not presuppose that he never changes his mind about anything—that whatever any of his main interlocutors uphold in one dialogue will continue to be presupposed or affirmed elsewhere without alteration.
It is, in fact, a difficult and delicate matter to determine, on the basis of our reading of the dialogues, whether Plato means to modify or reject in one dialogue what he has his main interlocutor affirm in some other. One of the most intriguing and controversial questions about his treatment of the forms, for example, is whether he concedes that his conception of those abstract entities is vulnerable to criticism; and, if so, whether he revises some of the assumptions he had been making about them, or develops a more elaborate picture of them that allows him to respond to that criticism.
In Parmenides , the principal interlocutor not Socrates—he is here portrayed as a promising, young philosopher in need of further training—but rather the pre-Socratic from Elea who gives the dialogue its name: Parmenides subjects the forms to withering criticism, and then consents to conduct an inquiry into the nature of oneness that has no overt connection to his critique of the forms.
Does the discussion of oneness a baffling series of contradictions—or at any rate, propositions that seem, on the surface, to be contradictions in some way help address the problems raised about forms?
That is one way of reading the dialogue. And if we do read it in this way, does that show that Plato has changed his mind about some of the ideas about forms he inserted into earlier dialogues? It is not easy to say. But we cannot even raise this as an issue worth pondering unless we presuppose that behind the dialogues there stands a single mind that is using these writings as a way of hitting upon the truth, and of bringing that truth to the attention of others.
If we find Timaeus the principal interlocutor of the dialogue named after him and the Eleatic visitor of the Sophist and Statesman talking about forms in a way that is entirely consistent with the way Socrates talks about forms in Phaedo and Republic , then there is only one reasonable explanation for that consistency: Plato believes that their way of talking about forms is correct, or is at least strongly supported by powerful considerations.
If, on the other hand, we find that Timaeus or the Eleatic visitor talks about forms in a way that does not harmonize with the way Socrates conceives of those abstract objects, in the dialogues that assign him a central role as director of the conversation, then the most plausible explanation for these discrepancies is that Plato has changed his mind about the nature of these entities.
It would be implausible to suppose that Plato himself had no convictions about forms, and merely wants to give his readers mental exercise by composing dialogues in which different leading characters talk about these objects in discordant ways.
The same point—that we must view the dialogues as the product of a single mind, a single philosopher, though perhaps one who changes his mind—can be made in connection with the politics of Plato's works.
It is noteworthy, to begin with, that Plato is, among other things, a political philosopher. For he gives expression, in several of his writings particular Phaedo , to a yearning to escape from the tawdriness of ordinary human relations. Similarly, he evinces a sense of the ugliness of the sensible world, whose beauty pales in comparison with that of the forms. Because of this, it would have been all too easy for Plato to turn his back entirely on practical reality, and to confine his speculations to theoretical questions.
Some of his works— Parmenides is a stellar example—do confine themselves to exploring questions that seem to have no bearing whatsoever on practical life.
But it is remarkable how few of his works fall into this category. Even the highly abstract questions raised in Sophist about the nature of being and not-being are, after all, embedded in a search for the definition of sophistry; and thus they call to mind the question whether Socrates should be classified as a sophist—whether, in other words, sophists are to be despised and avoided.
In any case, despite the great sympathy Plato expresses for the desire to shed one's body and live in an incorporeal world, he devotes an enormous amount of energy to the task of understanding the world we live in, appreciating its limited beauty, and improving it.
His tribute to the mixed beauty of the sensible world, in Timaeus , consists in his depiction of it as the outcome of divine efforts to mold reality in the image of the forms, using simple geometrical patterns and harmonious arithmetic relations as building blocks.
The desire to transform human relations is given expression in a far larger number of works. Socrates presents himself, in Plato's Apology , as a man who does not have his head in the clouds that is part of Aristophanes' charge against him in Clouds.
He does not want to escape from the everyday world but to make it better. He presents himself, in Gorgias , as the only Athenian who has tried his hand at the true art of politics. Similarly, the Socrates of Republic devotes a considerable part of his discussion to the critique of ordinary social institutions—the family, private property, and rule by the many. The motivation that lies behind the writing of this dialogue is the desire to transform or, at any rate, to improve political life, not to escape from it although it is acknowledged that the desire to escape is an honorable one: the best sort of rulers greatly prefer the contemplation of divine reality to the governance of the city.
And if we have any further doubts that Plato does take an interest in the practical realm, we need only turn to Laws. A work of such great detail and length about voting procedures, punishments, education, legislation, and the oversight of public officials can only have been produced by someone who wants to contribute something to the improvement of the lives we lead in this sensible and imperfect realm.
Further evidence of Plato's interest in practical matters can be drawn from his letters, if they are genuine. In most of them, he presents himself as having a deep interest in educating with the help of his friend, Dion the ruler of Syracuse, Dionysius II, and thus reforming that city's politics. Just as any attempt to understand Plato's views about forms must confront the question whether his thoughts about them developed or altered over time, so too our reading of him as a political philosopher must be shaped by a willingness to consider the possibility that he changed his mind.
For example, on any plausible reading of Republic , Plato evinces a deep antipathy to rule by the many. Socrates tells his interlocutors that the only politics that should engage them are those of the anti-democratic regime he depicts as the paradigm of a good constitution. And yet in Laws , the Athenian visitor proposes a detailed legislative framework for a city in which non-philosophers people who have never heard of the forms, and have not been trained to understand them are given considerable powers as rulers.
Plato would not have invested so much time in the creation of this comprehensive and lengthy work, had he not believed that the creation of a political community ruled by those who are philosophically unenlightened is a project that deserves the support of his readers.
Has Plato changed his mind, then? Has he re-evaluated the highly negative opinion he once held of those who are innocent of philosophy? Did he at first think that the reform of existing Greek cities, with all of their imperfections, is a waste of time—but then decide that it is an endeavor of great value? And if so, what led him to change his mind?
Answers to these questions can be justified only by careful attention to what he has his interlocutors say. But it would be utterly implausible to suppose that these developmental questions need not be raised, on the grounds that Republic and Laws each has its own cast of characters, and that the two works therefore cannot come into contradiction with each other. According to this hypothesis one that must be rejected , because it is Socrates not Plato who is critical of democracy in Republic , and because it is the Athenian visitor not Plato who recognizes the merits of rule by the many in Laws , there is no possibility that the two dialogues are in tension with each other.
Against this hypothesis, we should say: Since both Republic and Laws are works in which Plato is trying to move his readers towards certain conclusions, by having them reflect on certain arguments—these dialogues are not barred from having this feature by their use of interlocutors—it would be an evasion of our responsibility as readers and students of Plato not to ask whether what one of them advocates is compatible with what the other advocates. If we answer that question negatively, we have some explaining to do: what led to this change?
Alternatively, if we conclude that the two works are compatible, we must say why the appearance of conflict is illusory. Many contemporary scholars find it plausible that when Plato embarked on his career as a philosophical writer, he composed, in addition to his Apology of Socrates, a number of short ethical dialogues that contain little or nothing in the way of positive philosophical doctrine, but are mainly devoted to portraying the way in which Socrates punctured the pretensions of his interlocutors and forced them to realize that they are unable to offer satisfactory definitions of the ethical terms they used, or satisfactory arguments for their moral beliefs.
According to this way of placing the dialogues into a rough chronological order—associated especially with Gregory Vlastos's name see especially his Socrates Ironist and Moral Philosopher , chapters 2 and 3 —Plato, at this point of his career, was content to use his writings primarily for the purpose of preserving the memory of Socrates and making plain the superiority of his hero, in intellectual skill and moral seriousness, to all of his contemporaries—particularly those among them who claimed to be experts on religious, political, or moral matters.
For example, it is sometimes said that Protagoras and Gorgias are later, because of their greater length and philosophical complexity. Other dialogues—for example, Charmides and Lysis —are thought not to be among Plato's earliest within this early group, because in them Socrates appears to be playing a more active role in shaping the progress of the dialogue: that is, he has more ideas of his own.
Aristotle describes Socrates as someone whose interests were restricted to only one branch of philosophy—the realm of the ethical; and he also says that he was in the habit of asking definitional questions to which he himself lacked answers Metaphysics b1, Sophistical Refutations b7.
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