Mugler maintains that interpreters have been mistaken in drawing from the pedagogical plan of Republic VII any general conclusion concerning the relative position which Plato assigned to philosophical speculation and mathematics, that in Plato's own intellectual experience the relation of the two was the reverse of that assigned to them there, mathematics being more often the end of metaphysical reflection than its point of departure, and that he recommended mathematical study to his pupils not merely as a propaedeutic for dialectic (...) but primarily because from his own experience he believed that subsequent philosophical meditation upon the fund of knowledge thus acquired would often lead to mathematical discoveries. Mugler does not say how this thesis is to be reconciled with the fact that at the end of the Laws dialectic is still declared to be the supreme science and that in such a late passage as Philebus 57 D ff. as well as in an early one like Euthydemus 290 C, neither of which is "pedagogical," the supremacy of dialectic and its priority to mathematics are affirmed as emphatically as in Republic VII; he simply says that a close interpretation of the "metaphysical" dialogues and the Timaeus will substantiate his contention, and it is therefore necessary to examine his interpretation in detail. (shrink)

Plato's lectures: a hypothesis for an enigma.--Speusippus, Xenocrates, and the polemical method of Aristotle.--The Academy: orthodoxy, heresy, or philosophical interpretation?

... a professor of English literature was widely acclaimed for having made an important discovery in his field of research ; he had found in certain English ...

The word δξα is used frequently by Plato and with the many shades of meaning that it had in the idiomatic Greek of his time. References to all its occurrences and to those of δοξζω in the Platonic corpus Lafrance gives in an appendix to his book ; and from these in his first chapter he selects typical cases to exemplify a score or more of what he calls “literary” meanings, which he divides into two main groups, the objective sense, (...) “appearance”, and the subjective, “opinion”. By eliminating the occurrences of doxa in these colloquial or “literary” senses he restricts his investigation to Plato's philosophical uses of the term, disregarding even the occurrences of these in what he deems to be merely repetitious or undeveloped passages and subjecting to minute analysis only the most fully developed and consequently most significant philosophical passages concerned with doxa. This is the fourth of the four methodological principles that are formulated by Lafrance to govern his investigation and read in the light of which the dialogues, he believes, reveal an intelligibly coherent theory of doxa. According to the first of these principles in the reading of any Platonic text there must be borne in mind the period of Plato's intellectual evolution in which it was written and the nature of his epistemological notions at that moment; according to the second, Platonic dialogues being genuine philosophical dramas, it is always as fulfilling a function in a definite dramatic situation that Plato discloses his thought to the precise extent that he has decided to do so, and consequently any passage on doxa, to which as such no dialogue is devoted, must be understood in the light of the context in which the question of doxa has arisen. According to the third principle the understanding of a Platonic text requires that account be taken of the scholarly literature dealing with it. (shrink)