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[ 09-12-2002 ]
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[ Philosophy ]
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[ Greek ]
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Why Aristotle and Plato, and in that Order?
(This information is taken verbatim from Part I of the Course Packet)
Table of Contents
II. WHY WE STUDY MAINLY PLATO AND ARISTOTLE, AND WHY WE STUDY ARISTOTLE BEFORE PLATO
1. The Pre-Socratics and Sophists
Western philosophy begins with the "pre-Socratics". These are physicist-theologian-philosophers prior to the time of Socrates. The most important of these are the Milesian cosmologists, Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes (all things are water, all things are air, all things are the indefinite) Heraclitus ("Everything flows, nothing remains," "You can't step into the same river twice"), Parmenides (Being is one, change is impossible, you can't think or talk of "what doesn't exist"), and the post-Parmenidean theorists Empedocles (everything is either earth, air, fire, or water, related to each other by love or strife), Anaxagoras, and the atomist Democritus (all things are atoms and the void; and basic properties of shape, position, and orientation explain all other properties, such as color and taste).(1) By any account, these must have been extraordinary intellectual adventurers.
Unfortunately, their work has come down to us in fragments only, together with lots of comment from later interpreters, starting with Plato and Aristotle and including interpreters as late as the sixth century A.D. In "Some Important Dates in Ancient Western Philosophy", below, I give brief and rough indications of what some of their views might have been, and of the quantity of their writings available.)
There is a huge literature, especially from the last two centuries, trying to dope out what those views are, and trying to assess these positions as they might have been viewed at the time (as opposed to viewing them through the conceptual spectacles of Plato and Aristotle). Aristotle is the first thinker to attempt to present some of their views systematically. But it is in the service of a conceptual scheme Aristotle more or less invented, and which I call the method of thing and attribute; and it is widely (and no doubt correctly) argued that Aristotle systematically distorts the Pre-Socratic views he presents in the interest of presenting his own scheme. That Aristotelian conceptual scheme has come to dominate our thought to such an extent as to make it almost impossible to see things any other way.
In the case of the pre-Socratics, I believe that, given how few actual pages of text we have from any of them, there are just too few controls on our interpretations of them for us to say anything that is philosophically reliable about them. By contrast, with Socrates (Plato's early dialogues), Plato (Plato's middle and late dialogues), and Aristotle, there are many hundreds of pages over which interpreters may hope to get somewhere in supporting their own interpretations and rejecting those of others.
Similar remarks apply to that group of philosophers called the "Sophists", older contemporaries of Socrates, who turned away from the cosmology and metaphysics of the pre-Socratics to human affairs. (Just as, according to Aristotle, Socrates had no interest in science or metaphysics, but only in human affairs--in ethics.) The most important of these are Gorgias the orator and Protagoras (for whom the human being is "the measure of all things"). Both of them inspired major dialogues from Plato. Indeed an attack on Protagorean relativism (the truth is as it appears to each individual human being) is the inspiration of what is arguably Plato's greatest dialogue, the Theaetetus. Nevertheless, once more, attempts to get behind Plato and Aristotle's view of those two thinkers to the thinkers themselves is, in practice, a speculative venture. Fortunately, Plato's Protagoras (as he shows up in the Theaetetus) is one of the great philosophers of Western thought--in my opinion he anticipates most of what is important in Hume and Kant. That Protagoras we shall be discussing. For we shall be discussing Plato's Theaetetus.
2. Socrates.
This brings us down to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. We have no writings of Socrates, only certain dialogues composed by others that can look as if they are meant to describe actual conversations Socrates had with others. It is widely agreed that these written dialogues were mostly, if not exclusively, written after Socrates' death; and to some scholars they are at best literary creations in some unknowable way perhaps (in some cases) based on a historical Socrates and actual historical conversations, but actually expressing more the views of their authors than any views of the historical Socrates. Pretty well the only such dialogues that have survived intact from the period just after Socrates' death are those of Plato and Xenophon. Xenophon, whatever other admirable qualities he had--his Anabasis (translated in Penguin as The Persian Expedition) is a wonderful account of a military adventure gone wrong--was, from a philosophical point of view, of only the most pedestrian mind, and the Socrates he presents is little better. But then how are we to tell the difference between Socrates and Plato, if all we have to rely upon (apart from a few second-hand remarks in Aristotle) is what the main character in most of Plato's dialogues says? It turns out that, on stylistic grounds, we can distinguish (pretty roughly) amongst Plato's dialogues those that are early, those that are middle period, and those that are later.(2)
Many (especially many analytical philosophers of the past forty years or so) have argued that we should identify the main character of the early dialogues as, more or less, the historical Socrates, and the main characters of the middle and late dialogues with a Plato who is developing views of his own--some of them (a) elaborating and backing Socratic lines of thought, others of them (b) decidedly departing from Socratic lines of thought. (Instead of "the historical Socrates", it might be better to speak of a Plato still under the sway of a number of Socratic lines of thought some of which he would later back off from.) I give one example for each kind of case. (a) The Theory of Forms can be argued to provide backing (and indeed to have been designed to provide backing) for a position I would attribute to Plato's early dialogues and to the historical Socrates: that the question what things are ethically good is a factual, scientific question. (This continuity Aristotle seems to be granting in telling us that Socrates "sought the universal", while Plato, "separated" the universal and so made it a Form.
The idea here--however exactly we are supposed to understand "separating"--is that Socrates sought to answer such questions as "What is justice, quite generally?" and Plato constructed a metaphysical theory of such abstract objects [the "Forms"] as "Justice Itself" or "The Just itself" to provide us with answers to just such questions.) (b) On the other hand, Aristotle attributes specifically to Socrates an "intellectualist" pscyhology, according to which virtue is knowledge, vice is ignorance, and it is impossible for anyone to act on irrational appetites or desires contrary to what one at the instnat of action believes to be best for one. These doctrines are also found in Plato's early dialogues. By contrast, Platonic psychology, like Aristotlian psychology insists upon the existence of brute irrational desires which can make one act contrary to what one thinks best. In this, Plato is in nearly explicit opposition to Socratic rationalism about desire. (For the Socratic intellectualist, all desire moves one towards what one at the time believes best for one, so that one's desires are always directed in accordance with one's beliefs as to what is best--no desire surging up irrationally in us to act on us and produce voluntary actions in us in accordance with the irrational impulse).
Aristotle is in explicit opposition to Socrates' doctrines that rationalist doctrines that "No one errs willingly" and that knowledge of what it is best to do cannot be overcome by pleasure. Thus, while in case (a) there is continuity between Socrates (and the early dialogues), from the psychological differences in case (b) flow shockingly different political views. There is, for example, little room for general and open Socratic dialogue in Plato's meritocratic and repressive ideal state in the Republic (except in the very last stages of the education of the elite), and a lot of room for command and obedience (as opposed to acting on one's understanding of what is best). And the Socratic claim to know only that one does not know sits very ill with the elitism of Plato's political theory.(3)
Since, in the present course our time is severely limited, given what else there is to get through; and since I teach a separate course on Socratic ethics, and since Professor Gottlieb teaches a separate course on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics; I ignore in this course the ethics and political philosophy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. This means ignoring the early dialogues of Plato almost entirely.
In this course, I do not begin with Plato, but with the later thinker, Aristotle. This is because, in my opinion, in spite of much anti-Aristotelian movement in the Western tradition, Western philosophical thought is still so imbued with Aristotelian ways of thinking that philosophical perspective and philosophical clarity require that we treat of Aristotle quite early on. He tells us, in certain ways, where we are at. So I actually start with Aristotle. It is astonishing to realize that Aristotle thought these ways of thinking we take as almost axiomatic were actually brand new with him. As I view Aristotle, the centerpiece of his ways of thinking is what I have called the "method of thing and attribute". This idea of the world as consisting of things and properties--and of change taking place in the world by things either coming into existence, going out of existence, or changing some properties for others--is so natural to us, that it is startling to discover that this method was invented by Aristotle--and in opposition to Plato. Since Plato's views will strike us as peculiar in any case, it will be useful to us to see first what Aristotle took to be peculiar about Plato's views. At the same time, to be fair to Plato, we will need to look critically at how Aristotle (in reaction to Plato) constructs this method of thing and attribute (by means of which we will tend to look at Plato). We can hardly be fair to Plato without first reviewing and scrutinizing these Aristotelian ways of thinking that, in some areas, so displaced Platonic ways of thinking. So I begin with Aristotle.
I do not treat of the Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics, or Neo-Platonists in this course. Though they have been admired and spoken of with enthusiasm at various points in philosophical history, the philosophical work of the first three does not, in my opinion, approach in philosophical importance or subtlety, or originality, that of Plato and Aristotle. Here I commend standard works on Greek Philosophy as a guide to what authors to read. The Neo-Platonists are certainly important, because of their influence on St. Augustine and the Christian theological and philosophical tradition. But there is no hope of reading them discriminatingly without the kind of philosophical introduction to Plato and Aristotle attempted in this course. So the Neo-Platonists are also ignored in this course. [See again "Some Important Dates in Ancient Western Philosophy", below, as well as A.H. Armstrong's Introduction to Ancient Philosophy.]
Endnotes
(1) These three philosophers are called post-Parmenidean in part because their theories are designed as reactions to Parmenides' proscription against talk of "what doesn't exist". See below ch. ßßiii-iv.
(2) For more on stylometry, see early on in Part III (the Plato section of the course packet).
(3) For more on Socrates and the relation between Socrates and Plato, see my "Socrates and the Early Dialogues", in Richard Kraut (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992)--recommended and on reserve. For brief remarks on the division of Plato's dialogues into early, middle, and late, see "Dating Plato's Dialogues", below, as well as the preceding article; and for more detail, see Brandwood's article in the same Cambridge Companion to Plato. I have recently been made somewhat more cautious on my view about the historical Socrates thanks to conversations with Christopher Rowe, Professor of Greek at the University of Durham in the U.K. |
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