Clas 161/Phil108

These notes follow Malcolm Schofield's chapter in the Oxford Handbook to Plato, 'Plato in his time and place,' but they leave out the material at the end of that chapter (see lecture on Plato's Forms for that material).

• Plato: 427-347 BCE.

This is basically a whirlwind tour thru Plato and his environment.

• Plato and Socrates and their contemporaries
• Plato joined Socrates' circle of intimates as a young man, as he says at Apology 34a and Phaedo 59b
• After Socrates' death, many Socratic Discourses were written
• Plato's are the most famous
• They were probably written over a 40 year span of time: 390's BCE to 350's BCE
  
• We also have Xenophon's Socratica
• and fragmentary bits of others (Aeschines, Antisthenes, Eucleides)
• but most have been lost.
  
• Socratic Philosophy, as found in Plato (and Xenophon)
  
• Preoccupied with 'virtue.' I.e. understanding what it is to be an excellent human being: what we are here for: justice, wisdom, courage, etc. are all aspects of that. They are collectively called 'virtue.'
• Method: Conversation aimed at constructively testing ideas rather than set speeches or dogmatic writings. Philosophy is a living interaction between people. Socrates wrote no philosophy. Socrates did not teach either, at least he did not teach people what he thought the answers were. We might say he taught the questions and how to question.
• He also made explicit what assumptions he made by asking.
  
• He was aware of other models: he clashed with those who thought that teaching was a matter of telling people the answer as they saw it.
• Model for knowledge: skill, expertise (techne)
• Think of the Euthyphro and Republic I, where Soc. asks many questions that use skills such as medicine, equestrianism, or shipbuilding as a model for the sort of answers he is seeking about human excellences.
• In the time of Socrates' adulthood (last half of 5th century BCE), a whole scad of firsts in technical writing occurred: the first handbooks about medicine, geometry, perspective in painting, equestrianism, etc. were written.
  
• All of this reflects an era of great confidence in understanding and mastering nature and the production of artefacts.
• It also included reflection on what a techne is, what it means to be skilled.
• Socrates is suggesting that generic human excellence has a skill-like quality: it consists of interconnected knowledge.
  
• Sophists
• 'Sophist' is word used for any Greek intellectual of the time, who fit loosely into what we can call a Greek Enlightenment.
• "Sophist" came to also mean someone who taught for a fee.
• Some, like Hippias, were prepared to teach nearly everything: math, grammar, music, history, etc.
• These sophists often figure in the early dialogues of Plato: Gorgias, Hippias, Protagoras, Prodicus, Cratylus.
• SOPHISTS had many different views; they are not a coherent group; there is no "sophistic" thought like there is Platonic or Aristotelian thought.
  
• Plato engages with views of Sophists in his works. Some examples include:
  
• The Theaetetus is concerened with Protagoras' slogan: "Humans are the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, of the things that are not, that they are not."
• Several sophists claimed that justice is a matter of convention: Plato confronts that view in the Republic and the Gorgias.
• Hippias
  
• Many 'old-fashioned' Greeks thought sophists corrupted the young.
• That is because the sophists are coming up with new ideas, new ways to think, and these new ways are displacing some of the older ways.
  
• Plato does not condemn the sophists, but he does have strong differences with them, and he thought that the pursuit of power in a democracy corrupted the young more than associating with the sophists did.
  
• In all, Socrates likes some aspects of some sophists, and dislikes others: he does not seem to have a clear opinion about them as a group. Greeks would have considered Socrates himself a sophist, except he did not charge a fee for his company.
• Politics and Philosophy in Athens
  
• The trial, condemnation, and execution of Socrates figures largely in the dialogues: in 399 BCE, Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth, not believing in the gods of Athens, and of inventing new gods. He was convicted and condemned to death by a jury of 501 Athenians. Many Platonic dialogues are situated in that time, fictionarlly: the Theaetetus is situated in the time right before he goes to his pretrial. The Euthyphro is even closer to it: it is immediately before that pretrial. The Apology is Plato's reconstruction of his defense speech at the trial. The Crito and Phaedo are while he is in jail awaiting execution.
  
• The trial, condemnation, and execution of Socrates crystallizes the mismatch between the philosophical and the political life in Athens, as alluded to in the dialogues:
  
• In the Gorgias, Socrates says that a philosopher being tried in a legal court is like a nutritionist being prosecuted by a pastry and candy maker before a jury of children.
• In the Meno, Socrates' accuser Anytus has a bit part. Anytus is outraged at Socrates' suggestion that young Athenians should be educated by sophists and suggests that Athenians' fathers can best educate their sons, to which Socrates replies with a question: had the sons of the most famous Athenians--Pericles, Themistocles, and Aristides--turned out any better for being sons of such men?
  
• In the cave analogy of the Republic, the philosopher who has left the cave and discovered higher things on returning to the cave is confused and would make a fool of himself if he tried to compete with those who remain in the cave and practice shadow-puppetry.
• In the Theaetetus, philosophers are said to make fools of themselves in the law courts, and that is because they are concerned with the truly important, not the trivial.
• Plato apparently thought there is a fundamental problem with all politics for a philosopher (i.e. for anyone who is more concerned with truth than power or pleasing the people).
• But Plato himself was an Athenian aristocrat, and Athens was a very "political town"
  
• Athens provided him with a vibrant intellectual milieu: he could not have become the philosopher he was without it.
• Some might say that Plato came to conclude that the vibrant exchange of ideas and productively exuberant chaos of democracy were not as valuable as the things that could be accomplished by an enlightened authoritarian regime.
  
• The fragility of Plato and Socrates' world is constantly present as a backdrop in the dialogues: remember that Plato was born in 427.
  
• From 431-404 BCE, the Athenians were at war with Sparta and her allies, a war called the 'Peloponnesian War': 27 years long, and right in their own territory or nearby.
  
• The 'Sicilian Expedition': In 415 BCE, during a lull in the war, Athens sent a large military force to take the city-state of Syracuse, which was a powerful city on Sicily to the West of Athens. Alcibiades, a brilliant young man, and Nicias, an experienced general, were assigned to the force. Before it left, Alcibiades was implicated in the mutilation of some statues called herms. His trial occcurred while he was on expedition, and he was condemned. The Sicilian expedition failed completely and utterly.
  
• The Symposium  includes as characters Alcibiades, Phaedrus, and Eryximachus, all implicate in the affair of the herms (which was a huge scandal and resulted in Alcibiades' departure from Athens)
  
• The Charmides is set early in the war, and includes menacing words spoken by Charmides (Plato's uncle) to Socrates. Charmides would go on to be  involved in the oligarchic junta of the Thirty Tyrants (404 BCE), who were led by Critias (Charmides' mentor in the Charmides). The Thirty Tyrants basically were put in place at the end of the Peloponnesian war by Athen's enemy, Sparta. They ruled for about 8 months. They killed about 5% of the population.
  
• Nicias and Laches, the two main interlocutors in the Laches, died within a few years of the setting of the Laches, (Laches died in battle in 418, Nicias was executed by the Sicilians in 413). Nicias is asked in the dialogue whether he accepts divination. He says he does. In the Sicilian expedition, he delayed departure because of an eclipse of the moon, which contributed to the disaster.
• Cephalus, the old man at the beginning of the Republic, owned a large arms factory in Athens, which was confiscated by the Thirty Tyrants (404BCE). Both Polemarchus and Niceratus, also in the Republic, were condemned to die by the Thirty Tyrants.
• Plato's trip to the West
• In the 7th Letter, Plato writes that he went to Sicily at the age of 40, which puts his trip in the year 387.
  
• There he formed a friendship with Dion, the brother of Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse.
  
• Plato's conversion to Pythagoreanism.
• Pythagoreanism was a philosophy/religion strong in southern Italy.
  
• There, Plato probably came into contact with the Pythagorean philosophy of Archytas of Tarentum.
• We do not know for a fact that he met Archytas, but they are reported to have become friends.
  
• On his return, Plato founded the Academy, a group of philosophers who met at a sacred precinct and gymnasium called the "Academy"
• Plato's dialogues after that point show significant Pythagorean elements:
• immortality of the soul
• eschatology and myths of the afterlife or metempsychosis
• importance of mathematics for understanding reality
• philosophy can shape politics
• creation of a group of friends in Athens dedicated to philosophy
• Republic, Meno, Gorgias, Phaedo all show some of the elements above and are situated stylistically between the "early" dialogues and the "late" dialogues.
  
• The most economical explanation for the shift from Socratic exclusive concern with virtue ethics and aporetic dialogues to an expanded palette of topics and much more dogmatic dialogues is that Plato's trip to Sicily and southern Italy aroused those interests in him. They all cohere with what little we know of Pythagoreanism.
• Mathematics in particular: those four dialogues show significant interest in and faith in the importance of mathematics for understanding the fundamentals of reality.
• For Pythagoras himself, the historical character, not the one of later legends:
  
• we have no evidence that he was an active mathematician. We don't really even know if he discovered the "Pythagorean theorem." We do know that he thought number and proportions were important, perhaps merely symbolically, for understanding reality.
  
• we also know that he was a charismatic leader of a close knit group  who apparently followed rules of association.
• and his main teaching was about the soul and its place in the cosmic order.
• Archytas, the pythagorean
  
• an accomplished mathematician
• presented music as related to arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy
• calculation as path to political harmony and justice
• The upshot is that Plato's world changed after this trip to the west, and the way it changed maps pretty well onto pythagoreanism.
  
• Rhetoric
• Many of Plato's dialogues discuss rhetoric.
  
• Rhetoric is the art of public speaking and persuasion
• As an expertise with technical handbooks, rhetoric grew in the 5th century
• Plato attacked rhetoric
• Some sophists taught rhetoric, and insofar as they did so, Plato attacked them.
  
• In Plato's time, a rhetorical teacher and writer named Isocrates was one of Plato's main rivals.
• He started taking pupils in the 390s and steadily published treatises, many of which we have
• Isocrates' Against the Sophists is an early one
• Plato's Gorgias is partially aimed at something like this treatise
  
• Plato's Euthydemus is a strong condemnation of logic-chopping sophists, and may portray Isocrates as confusing logic-chopping with philosophy
• By this time, Isocrates' school was quite successful: perhaps one aim of Plato's dialogues is to contrast his Academy with Isocrates' school.
• Rhetoric versus philosophy (roughly persuasion versus reason-governed argument) was a refrain in the early Plato and continued to be in the Gorgias, Meno, Republic, etc.
  
• The Academy
• We don't know much about what happened there
• We know there were junior and senior members, that it was somehow exclusive
• Plato acquired a house and garden nearby: perhaps they ate there
• mathematicians were members: Eudoxos of Cnidos
• Aristotle's Topics is likely a formulation of rules for the sort of discussions that occurred in the Academy.
• The Academy continued as an institution for hundreds of years after Plato and underwent some significant transformations, including "Scepticism" and "Neoplatonism." It was internationally renowned and a destination for intellectuals.
• It was closed down when Justinian ceased to support the philosophical schools of Athens in 529 AD: a run of about 1000 years is not bad. Simplicius was its last head, and it may have continued in some fashion, but not in Athens.