Eleven articles on Plato and Socrates

I've gathered these 11 items together, since they are scattered through the blog. The chapter extract concerning 'The Platonic Theory of Being' is from The Sacred History of Being, published in 2015. The text  of 'Logical Modality in Classical Athens', along with some others, forms a chapter in Understanding Ancient Thought published by the Anshar Press in August 2017.  There are three extracts here also from J.G. Frazer and the Platonic Theory of Being, published in 2016. 

Justice and the Harmony of the Soul

explores the idea of Justice discussed in Plato’s Republic, which argues that the pursuit of special excellences by individuals, in terms of skills, and moral and intellectual virtue, without reference to the activities of other individuals, was understood to result in a harmonious arrangement of society. They are joined together as a consequence of the fact that each of the virtues is complete and perfected. 

Plato's Point of View

Plato’s main concern was what was truly real, which remained necessarily unchanging and itself, and therefore could not be present, at least as itself, in the world of the here and now. This is not however, how Plato is understood or represented by modern philosophers. There are two main schools of thought: the first is that his position is consistent throughout his work, but his work is shaped by an unknown agrapha (unwritten esoteric doctrine). The second is that his work represents a discursive exploration of philosophical questions, which comes to no firm conclusion.

Sameness and Difference in Plato 

is a discussion of the idea of the Plenum in Plato. Philosophical writing about the divine in the west departed from the consideration of reality as something intricately bound up with a plenum during the Middle Ages, and as a result, philosophical argument about the divine, all the way up to the present day, deals poorly with certain issues, and no longer resembles the kind of argument about the divine found in ancient literature. It also makes it difficult to understand what Plato means. 

The Significance of the Chapter on The Platonic Theory of Being

Though the chapter is a difficult read, it is not that difficult to explain. In conversation with a reader recently, I provided a short explanation of the nature of the chapter, and its significance for the overall argument of The Sacred History of Being. It concerns the belief that divinity could be present in inanimate objects, and whether reality itself is necessarily one. And the consequences which necessarily follow from such discussion.

The Platonic Theory of Being (chapter extract) 

Plato argues that, by systematic dialectical enquiry, we can rise from the realms of likelihood and opinion, where we encounter only similitudes, to the realm in which certain knowledge is possible. This is to be achieved by passing through the similitudes, on account of their similitude, to their ultimate origin, the Form of the Good.

Logical Modality in Classical Athens

Though we have recognised only one logical modality for more than two millennia, there were in fact two. One of them was appropriate to earthbound existence; the other supplied a rational basis for contact with the divine.

I Go to Die (The Death of Socrates)

Written in response to Socrates speech to his accusers, on being found guilty of the charges of moral corruption and impiety to the gods. Performed by Sir Derek Jacobi. [Almeida Theatre, ‘Figures of Speech’ series, published September 25, 2017]. The text of the speech (the edit used) is available here. Bettany Hughes' populist take on Socrates, 'A Man For Our Time', is here. Hughes has also written a book on Socrates, The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life (review by Tom Holland). Thanks to Stephanie Papadopoulos.


Post Enlightenment Plato, and That which Cannot Move

The Plato we have we look at differently from the way he was understood in antiquity. For most of the middle ages all that was available to scholars was the first part of the Timaeus. So it is not the case that a way of understanding Plato has been handed down to us, except via the neoplatonists. But the neoplatonist understanding of Plato is deprecated as a way of understanding his work, with the consequence that modern scholars approach Plato virtually naked, with a very modern set of intellectual baggage. This can be a problem.


Excluding Parmenides

This is an extract from J.G. Frazer and The Platonic Theory of Being, published April 4, 2016. In Frazer's early essay, Plato's Parmenides is scarcely discussed at all. This is particularly surprising, for the Parmenides contains criticism of Plato's doctrine by Plato himself; criticisms not adequately answered either in that dialogue or elsewhere in the canon. The chronological position of this dialogue is thus immensely important if we consider the work of Plato as a development. The extract is presented here without footnotes.

Running Folklore to the Death

An extract from J.G. Frazer and The Platonic Theory of Being. The ultimate "disappearance" of the Ideal theory as an explanatory device of any worth is read as Plato's rejection of his own theory; lingering in his work for a time, just as the Ptolemaic account of the Cosmos lingered on (in Milton's Paradise Lost, for example) after the work of Copernicus and Galileo rendered it theoretically outmoded.The extract is presented here without footnotes.

Is Plato's Ontology False?

An extract from J.G. Frazer and The Platonic Theory of Being.If we summarise Plato's view of the nature of the ultimate reality, we might say that it is always beyond understanding, unchanging, yet participates in the world of change - a paradoxical matrix. Is this a problem of epistemology? Is there no distinction between epistemology or ontology (since the world of change is what can be known)? Plato's ontology is shown to be beyond the mere projection of the categories of knowledge, since it is known at the point where the epistemology breaks down in contradictions. It is beyond all human categorisation. The Idea of the Good in the dialogues is simply part of the armoury of likelihoods employed by Plato - one of the assumed positions on the path to knowledge of Reality. The extract is presented here without footnotes.

Thomas Yaeger, October 7, 2017.

Five articles on Plato

I've gathered these together, since they are scattered through the blog. The chapter extract on the Platonic Theory of Being is from 'The Sacred History of Being'. The others are free-standing blog posts. The text  of 'Logical Modality in Classical Athens' will form part of a chapter in 'Abstract Conception in Greece and Assyria'.

Justice and the Harmony of the Soul

Plato's Point of View (and why we think he doesn't have one) 

Sameness and Difference in Plato 

The Platonic Theory of Being (chapter extract) 

Logical Modality in Classical Athens

Sameness and Difference in Plato

Part of The Sacred History of Being is devoted to a substantial discussion of the Ontological Argument. This may seem to be a rather odd inclusion in a book which is essentially about the idea of the plenum, and the presence of that idea in ancient history, at least as far back as the 14^th century before the common era. The reason the discussion is there is because philosophical writing about the divine in the west departed from the consideration of reality as something intricately bound up with a plenum during the Middle Ages. As a result, philosophical argument about the divine, all the way up to the present day, cannot deal credibly with certain issues, and no longer resembles the kind of argument about the divine found in ancient literature. The ontological argument, as formulated from the Middle Ages onwards, contains within itself the essence of the problem. Which is why I subjected it to a critical examination.

Essentially philosophy, as a craft and a discipline, is broken in the modern world. It spends a lot of time running around in circles, chasing its own tail, and is unable to resolve important questions. Philosophy is of course, by its very nature, difficult to do well, since it concerns itself with questions which are fundamental to our understanding of both ourselves and the world. However some of the difficulties encountered by philosophers over the past thousand years or so are problems with the presumptions of philosophy itself, not the complexity of the materials with which it works.

A striking feature of Plato’s discussion of the divine is his equation of the divine (ho Theos) with reality itself. He also speaks of the divine in the singular, within the context of a polytheistic culture. Why does he do this?

The answer is that he understood the idea that behind the world of appearance was an undifferentiated plenum. Unlike many modern philosophers, who take physical existence as a given, and do not ask fundamental questions about what physical existence is, and how it came to be, the question of how it came to be was something which was referenced not just in Plato’s Timaeus, which overtly addresses the question, but was a concern which surfaces in his other dialogues. The nature of the creation therefore was understood to have a bearing on many other questions which the philosopher ought to consider.

A key part of the concept of the plenum is that it represents our human understanding of how the world must have been before anything came to have physical existence. Modern cosmological models of the creation of the universe (such as they are), assume that there was some kind of creation ex nihilo, though the process is necessarily mysterious when looked at from the point of view of physics. The major problem with the idea of a physical creation, is that there is no physics before the creation, no laws of nature, no space, no extension, and no time. There is a complete absence of the principal characteristics of the physical world that we are familiar with. So there is nothing for a physicist to grapple with. Hence most discussion of the creation concerns itself with the hypothetical first microseconds after all these characteristics are imagined to magically and mysteriously appear.

Yet there is no absence at the root of the creation. To say that there is such an absence, is to presume the existence of a presence with which absence can be contradistinguished. There is nothing at all that we can define as an absence. Whatever it is, it transcends the category, ‘absence’. It is neither one thing, or its opposite. It simply is what it is.

How does recognising the transcendent nature of the underlying plenum change the way we must argue about the creation? The definition of the plenum is that, since it is something which cannot be understood as a presence or an absence, it represents instead the potential for such differentiation; in that sense it can be understood as a fullness of what it itself is. It is also the one thing which is truly real, in that it is itself, and does not change its nature. It is beyond time, space and extension. It is eternal, and eternally itself.

How then is the generation of physical reality, with its laws and properties, to be explained? Plato sometimes uses different terminology to refer to the same ideas in his dialogues, which has made some of his meaning opaque, but he does use the idea of the same and the different in connection with the creation of time, using the image of the celestial equator and the ecliptic. According to this image, time began when the two circles were set at an angle to each other.  

In referring to the same and the different, Plato is alluding to what we understand as the Pythagorean notion of the undefined dyad. If reality (the plenum) is one, and the one by itself alone, then, if more than one of anything is to have some kind of existence, the plenum must come to some kind of relationship with itself. So, the plenum (the same) must in some way stand in relation to itself as the different.

This of course is an abstract notion. The plenum is eternally itself, and unchanging. It is also one. If there is to be more than one, or a multiplicity of anything, this can only be in the form of a representation within the nature of the plenum. The representation is not truly real, and any movement within that representation is also not truly real.

This is the origin of the widespread notion in antiquity that the world is illusion, or Maya. The fact that aspects of this illusion can have fatal consequences to individuals, if a rock falls off a mountain, or if people are swept away by a flood, does not undermine the notion that the physical world is illusion, in comparison with the reality of the underlying plenum. Neither does the fact that the physical world is structured according to strict rules, and also functions according to strict rules of what is and is not possible.