Given its brevity, Plato's Meno covers an astonishingly wide array of topics: politics, education, virtue, definition, philosophical method, mathematics, the nature and acquisition of knowledge and immortality. Its treatment of these, though profound, is tantalisingly short, leaving the reader with many unresolved questions. This book confronts the dialogue's many enigmas and attempts to solve them in a way that is both lucid and sympathetic to Plato's philosophy. Reading the dialogue as a whole, it explains how different arguments are related to (...) one another and how the interplay between characters is connected to the philosophical content of the work. In a new departure, this book's exploration focuses primarily on the content and coherence of the dialogue in its own right and not merely in the context of other dialogues, making it required reading for all students of Plato, be they from the world of classics or philosophy. (shrink)
Questions about learning and discovery have fascinated philosophers from Plato onwards. Does the mind bring innate resources of its own to the process of learning or does it rely wholly upon experience? Plato was the first philosopher to give an innatist response to this question and in doing so was to provoke the other major philosophers of ancient Greece to give their own rival explanations of learning. This book examines these theories of learning in relation to each other. It presents (...) an entirely different interpretation of the theory of recollection which also changes the way we understand the development of ancient philosophy after Plato. The final section of the book compares ancient theories of learning with the seventeenth-century debate about innate ideas, and finds that the relation between the two periods is far more interesting and complete than is usually supposed. (shrink)
Who were the true forerunners of the seventeenth-century theorists of innate ideas? Credit should go, not to Plato, despite the common label Platonist, but to the Stoics—or so this challenging new study claims. Plato’s celebrated doctrine of knowledge as recollection differed from these others’ theories not merely in its extravagant postulate of a prenatal knowing state but in many hitherto unrecognized ways, Scott argues. Among those who shared the belief that all men are endowed at birth with considerable epistemological resources, (...) Plato alone is a pessimist both about how few of us make any use of these—only those who make philosophical progress—and about the difficulty of unearthing these resources. Contrary to a prevalent view, Scott holds that Plato invokes recollection to explain not “ordinary learning,” the acquisition or application of everyday concepts such as equality or beauty, but “higher learning”—the province of the philosopher. (shrink)
This paper tackles some issues arising from Plato's account of the democratic man in Rep. VIII. One problem is that Plato tends to analyse him in terms of the desires that he fulfils, yet sends out conflicting signals about exactly what kind of desires are at issue. Scholars are divided over whether all of the democrat's desires are appetites. There is, however, strong evidence against seeing him as exclusively appetitive: rather he is someone who satisfies desires from all three parts (...) of his soul, although his rational and spirited desires differ significantly from those of the philosopher or the timocrat. A second problem concerns the question why the democrat ranks so low in Plato's estimation, especially why he is placed beneath the oligarch. My explanation is that Plato presents him as a jumble of desires, someone in whom order and unity have all but disintegrated. In this way he represents a step beyond the merely bipolarised oligarch. The final section of the paper focuses on the democrat's rational part, and asks whether it plays any role in shaping his life as a whole. For the disunity criticism to hold, Plato ought to allow very little global reasoning: if there were a single deliberating reason imposing a life plan upon his life, the fragmentation of life and character discussed earlier would only be superficial. I argue that Plato attributes very little global reasoning to the democrat. Aside from the fact that the text fails to mention such reasoning taking place, Plato's views on the development of character and his use of the state-soul analogy show that the democrat's lifestyle is determined just by the strength of the desires that he happens to feel at any one time. (shrink)
Dominic Scott compares the Republic and Nicomachean Ethics from a methodological perspective. He argues that Plato and Aristotle distinguish similar levels of argument in the defence of justice, and that they both follow the same approach: Plato because he thinks it will suffice, Aristotle because he thinks there is no need to go beyond it.
[David Charles] Aristotle, it appears, sometimes identifies well-being with one activity, sometimes with several, including ethical virtue. I argue that this appearance is misleading. In the Nicomachean Ethics, intellectual contemplation is the central case of human well-being, but is not identical with it. Ethically virtuous activity is included in human well-being because it is an analogue of intellectual contemplation. This structure allows Aristotle to hold that while ethically virtuous activity is valuable in its own right, the best life available for (...) humans is centred around, but not wholly constituted by, intellectual contemplation. /// [Dominic Scott] In Nicomachean Ethics X 7-8, Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of eudaimonia, primary and secondary. The first corresponds to contemplation, the second to activity in accordance with moral virtue and practical reason. My task in this paper is to elucidate this distinction. Like Charles, I interpret it as one between paradigm and derivative cases; unlike him, I explain it in terms of similarity, not analogy. Furthermore, once the underlying nature of the distinction is understood, we can reconcile the claim that paradigm eudaimonia consists just in contemplation with a passage in the first book requiring eudaimonia to involve all intrinsic goods. (shrink)
The belief in innate knowledge has a history almost as long as that of philosophy itself. In our own century it has been propounded in a linguistic context by Chomsky, who sees himself as the heir to a tradition including such philosophers as Descartes, the Cambridge Platonists and Leibniz. But the ancestor of all these is, of course, Plato's theory of recollection or anamnesis. This stands out as unique among all other innatist theses not simply because it was the first, (...) but also because it is in some respects the strangest: Plato proposed not just a theory of innate knowledge, but of forgotten knowledge, and this, of course, goes hand in hand with his interest in the pre-existence of the soul. But my concern here is with another difference that makes Plato's theory unique, though it is not as clear as the previous one: in fact it has been for the most part over-looked by commentators and scholars. I wish to argue that while other theories of innate knowledge or ideas hold that much of what is innate in us is realized automatically and with ease, be it knowledge of moral principles, the idea of cause and effect or linguistic competence, anamnesis is concerned only with the attainment of hard philosophical knowledge, which most of us never reach. (shrink)
This volume presents essays and seminars by Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede, two of the most eminent scholars of ancient philosophy in recent decades, on the fascinating and much-debated Seventh Platonic Letter. They question the authenticity of the letter by showing how its philosophical content conflicts with the Platonic dialogues.
Maieusis pays tribute to the highly influential work of Myles Burnyeat, whose contributions to the study of ancient philosophy have done much to enhance the ...
The subject of this paper is poetic creativity as it features in various Platonic works: the nature and source of creativity, as well as the way in which it differs from the activity of philosophy. I shall argue that Plato gives us at least three quite different models of poetic creativity. One can be extracted from the Ion and the Meno, another from the Symposiim and a third from the Gorgias and Republic VI. The main focus of this paper will (...) be on the model given in the Symposium where Diotima talks of how such poets as Homer and Hesiod succeeded in creating works that would secure them everlasting memory. This passage has not received the attention it deserves within discussions of Platonic poetics, and it is all the more interesting when juxtaposed with the more familiar account of poetic creativity found in the Ion. (shrink)
Our disagreements concern points of some importance. There is the question whether the soul in itself is blank like a writing tablet on which nothing has as yet been written – a tabula rasa – as Aristotle and the author of the Essay maintain, and whether everything which is inscribed there comes solely from the senses and experience; or whether the soul inherently contains the sources of various notions and doctrines which external objects merely rouse up on suitable occasions, as (...) I believe and as do Plato and even the Schoolmen, and those who understand in this sense the passage in Saint Paul where he says that God's law is written in our hearts. The Stoics call these sources Prolepses, that is fundamental assumptions or things taken for granted in advance. (shrink)
Some people have objected that the very idea of philosophy in business is an oxymoron. But why? Does philosophy have to be, by its very nature, other-worldly? If so, how could there be such a thing as political philosophy? Perhaps some would say that philosophers who become involved in business are engaging in a kind of intellectual prostitution. But studying business is different from being paid by business.
In this chapter, we investigate the idea of trade marks as property. Three questions need to be answered. The first is a conceptual matter: are trade marks capable of being property or are they ruled out as a matter of conceptual necessity? The second is conceptual-cum-descriptive: is the current law's treatment of trade marks treatment of them as property? The third is normative: if the current law does in fact treat them as property, is it right to do so? The (...) questions need to be tackled in turn. (shrink)
Plato and Aristotle used moral philosophy to influence the way people actually live. Focusing on the Republic and the Nicomachean Ethics, this book examines how far they thought it could succeed in this.
Illusions play a central part in Epicurean philosophy. One of its fundamental assumptions is that men are the victims of a certain grand illusion and, as long as they remain so, can never aspire to a happy life. This is the illusion that pleasures can be increased in intensity without limit. It is as a result of this that men go to enormous lengths to enlarge their capacity to procure more pleasure, struggling in pursuit of goals that can rarely, if (...) ever, be achieved. But here mankind has made a disastrous mistake: the limit of pleasure is reached with the removal of pain, and after that point it cannot be increased, only varied. The illusion has therefore led to a tragic state of affairs, a sad history of fruitless war, struggle and ambition and it is a vital part of Epicurus’ programme to rid men of this evil by teaching them the true limits of pleasure. (shrink)
Throughout much of the critique of poetry in Republic X, Socrates exploits a parallel between painting and poetry. I argue there are two distinct methods at work here, the ‘similarity’ and ‘heuristic’ methods. The first uses painting to discover the general definition of mimesis, which is then swiftly applied to poetry. The second describes certain features of painting before using independent arguments to show that these also apply to poetry. That Socrates sometimes uses the parallel in this heuristic way is (...) not new in the literature. My purpose is to be more precise about what these two methods are, when Socrates uses one or the other, and why. At the end of the paper, I argue that the painting–poetry parallel is methodologically very similar to the state–soul parallel used earlier in the work. This allows us to view the arguments of Republic X in a more sympathetic light. (shrink)
Some people have objected that the very idea of philosophy in business is an oxymoron. But why? Does philosophy have to be, by its very nature, other-worldly? If so, how could there be such a thing as political philosophy? Perhaps some would say that philosophers who become involved in business are engaging in a kind of intellectual prostitution. But studying business is different from being paid by business.
This book is open access under a CC BY license. The first of its kind, this 'Report' gives an overview of the humanities worldwide. Published as an Open Access title and based on an extensive literature review and enlightening interviews conducted with 90 humanities scholars across 40 countries, the book offers a first step in attempting to assess the state of the humanities globally. Its topics include the nature and value of the humanities, the challenge of globalisation, the opportunities offered (...) by the digital humanities, variations in funding patterns around the world, and the interaction between humanities and society. Despite the stereotypical view of humanists as scholars locked away in their ivory towers, the picture that emerges from this report is that they are deeply committed to the social value of their work and appreciate the long-term importance it has for addressing global challenges. The report will be of interest not only to researchers and students in the humanities themselves, but also to administrators and funders. (shrink)
