Moreover, they shared a particular view of philosophical progress, in which the problems that define the philosophical enterprise are seen and understood ever more clearly, and in which their answers become more and more apparent. Aristotle in the first book of his Metaphysics, and Hegel in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy saw the teachings of the earlier philosophers they recorded as halting steps in the direction of a vision they were themselves to expound. Only someone with supreme self-confidence as a philosopher could write its history in such a way. The temptation for most philosopher historians is to see philosophy not as culminating in their own work, but rather as a gradual progress to whatever philosophical system is currently in fashion. But this temptation should be resisted. There is no force that guarantees philosophical progress in any particular direction. Indeed, it can be called into question whether philosophy makes any progress at all. The major philosophical problems, some say, are all still being debated after centuries of discussion, and are no nearer to any definitive resolution. [...] Most dissertations that begin with literature searches seek to show that all work hitherto has left a gap that will now be filled by the author’s original research. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is no exception. His not too hidden agenda is to show how previous philosophers neglected the remaining member of the quartet of causes: the final cause, which was to play a most significant role in his own philosophy of nature (Metaph. A 5. 988b6–15). The earliest philosophy, he concluded, is, on all subjects, full of babble, since in its beginnings it is but an infant (Metaph. A 5. 993a15–17).

Note: history as slanted evidence to support self-importance; russell did this; can you take the ego out of history? [e]

Location 74

There are those who think that the major task of philosophy is to cure us of intellectual confusion. On this modest view of the philosopher’s role, the tasks to be addressed differ across history, since each period needs a different form of therapy. The knots into which the undisciplined mind ties itself differ from age to age, and different mental motions are necessary to untie the knots. A prevalent malady of our own age, for instance, is the temptation to think of the mind as a computer, whereas earlier ages were tempted to think of it as a telephone exchange, a pedal organ, a homunculus, or a spirit. Maladies of earlier ages may be dormant, such as the belief that the stars are living beings; or they may return, such as the belief that the stars enable one to predict human behaviour.

Note: evolving era-specific confusion; are they different tasks or different metaphors? or both? has the mind as a computer metaphor been fully unpacked in terms of cultural operating systems, beyond McKenna's memes? [e]

Location 134

I should make clear at the outset that in the case of many of my historical subjects I write of necessity as an amateur rather than as an expert. In an age when the academic study of past philosophers has expanded exponentially, no one person can read more than a fraction of the vast secondary literature that has proliferated in recent years around every one of the thinkers discussed in this volume. I have myself contributed to the scholarly discussion of several of the great philosophers of the past, in particular Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Frege, and Wittgenstein, and I have published monographs on some of the subjects covered by my thematic chapters, such as the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of religion. But in compiling the bibliographies for the earlier parts I was made aware how vast was the extent of material I have not read in comparison with the amount that I am familiar with. Any single author who attempts to cover the entire history of philosophy is quickly made aware that in matters of detail he is at an enormous disadvantage in comparison with the scholars who have made individual philosophers their field of expertise. By compensation, a history written by a single hand may be able to emphasize features of the history of philosophy that are less obvious in the works of committees of specialists, just as an aerial photograph may bring out features of a landscape that are almost invisible to those close to the ground.

Note: depth vs breadth

Location 230

Aristotle offers a classification of the earliest Greek philosophers in accordance with the structure of his system of the four causes. Scientific inquiry, he believed, was above all inquiry into the causes of things; and there were four different kinds of cause: the material cause, the efficient cause, the formal cause, and the final cause.

Note: elments, actor, proportion, end

Location 370

Only two sayings are recorded of Thales of Miletus (c.625–545 BC), traditionally the founding father of Greek philosophy. They illustrate the mélange of science and religion, for one of them was ‘All things are full of gods’, and the other was ‘Water is the first principle of everything’. Thales was a geometer, the first to discover the method of inscribing a right-angled triangle in a circle; he celebrated this discovery by sacrificing an ox to the gods (D.L. 1. 24–5). He measured the height of the pyramids by measuring their shadows at the time of day when his own shadow was as long as he was tall. He put his geometry to practical use: having proved that triangles with one equal side and two equal angles are congruent, he used this result to determine the distance of ships at sea. Thales also had a reputation as an astronomer and a meteorologist. In addition to predicting the eclipse, he is said to have been the first to show that the year contained 365 days, and to determine the dates of the summer and winter solstices. He studied the constellations and made estimates of the sizes of the sun and moon. He turned his skill as a weather forecaster to good account: foreseeing an unusually good olive crop, he took a lease on all the oil mills and made a fortune through his monopoly. Thus, Aristotle said, he showed that philosophers could easily be rich if they wished (Pol. 1. 11. 1259a6–18).

Note: the first man of space and time [e]

Location 416

On the other hand, he became a byword for unworldly absent-mindedness. Plato, among others, tells the following tale: Thales was studying the stars and gazing into the sky, when he fell into a well, and a jolly and witty Thracian servant girl made fun of him, saying that he was crazy to know about what was up in the heavens while he could not see what was in front of him beneath his feet. (Theaetetus 174a) An unlikely story went around that he had met his death by just such a fall while stargazing.

Note: symbolic death, caused by your trade

Location 427

Thales’ remarks heralded many centuries of philosophical disdain for marriage. Anyone who makes a list of a dozen really great philosophers is likely to discover that the list consists almost entirely of bachelors. One plausible list, for instance, would include Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein, none of whom were married.…

Note: on not trusting idea from someone before theyve had kids [e]

Location 434

people found it hard to understand Thales’ adoption of water as the ultimate principle of explanation. The earth, he said, rested on water like a log floating in a stream—but then, asked Aristotle, what does the water rest on? (Cael. 2. 13. 294a28–34). He went further and said that everything came from and was in some sense made out of water. Again, his reasons were obscure, and Aristotle could only conjecture that it…

Note: the truth in primitive intuitions

Location 437

Anaximander of Miletus (d. c.547 BC). We know rather more about his views, because he left behind a book entitled On Nature, written in prose, a medium just beginning to come into fashion. Like Thales he was credited with a number of original scientific achievements: the first map of the world, the first star chart, the first Greek sundial, and an indoor clock as well. He taught that the earth was cylindrical in shape, like a stumpy column no higher than a third of its diameter.

Note: His map of the world has the Mediterranean Sea at the middle with land all around it. The outlines of Greece and Italy are loosely correct, but the entire paradigm is inverted—a good metaphor for ego-centric perspective, probably better than the heliocentric overturn. Both examples of local frames with no global frames at all. Bigger question now is how the universe itself is just a local frame, and we are reaching for possible paradigms beyond it. [e]

Location 442

Anaximander offered an account of the origin of the present world, and explained what forces had acted to bring it into existence, inquiring, as Aristotle would say, into the efficient as well as the material cause. He saw the universe as a field of competing opposites: hot and cold, wet and dry. Sometimes one of a pair of opposites is dominant, sometimes the other: they encroach upon each other and then withdraw, and their interchange is governed by a principle of reciprocity. As Anaximander put it poetically in his one surviving fragment, ‘they pay penalty and render reparation to each other for their injustice under the arbitration of time’ (DK 12 B1). Thus, one surmises, in winter the hot and the dry make reparation to the cold and the wet for the aggression they committed in summer. Heat and cold were the first of the opposites to make their appearance, separating off from an original cosmic egg of the everlasting indeterminate stuff. From them developed the fire and earth which, we have seen, lay at the origin of our present cosmos.

Note: origins of spectrums? influenced arisroles ethics?

Location 462

In this way rarefaction and condensation can conjure everything out of the underlying air (KRS 140–1). In support of this claim Anaximenes appealed to experience, and indeed to experiment—an experiment that the reader can easily carry out for herself. Blow on your hand, first with the lips pursed, and then from an open mouth: the first time the air will feel cold, and the second time hot. This, argued Anaximenes, shows the connection between density and temperature (KRS 143).

Location 477

The Milesians, then, are not yet real physicists, but neither are they myth-makers. They have not yet left myth behind, but they are moving away from it. They are not true philosophers either, unless by ‘philosophy’ one simply means infant science. They make little use of conceptual analysis and the a priori argument that has been the stock-in-trade of philosophers from Plato to the present day. They are speculators, in whose speculations elements of philosophy, science, and religion mingle in a rich and heady brew.

Location 484

Pythagoras is credited with inventing the word ‘philosopher’: instead of claiming to be a sage or wise man (sophos) he modestly said that he was only a lover of wisdom (philosophos)

Location 492

Pythagoras’ philosophical community at Croton was the prototype of many such institutions: it was followed by Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, Epicurus’ Garden, and many others. Some such communities were legal entities, and others less formal; some resembled a modern research institute, others were more like monasteries. Pythagoras’ associates held their property in common and lived under a set of ascetic and ceremonial rules: observe silence, do not break bread, do not pick up crumbs, do not poke the fire with a sword, always put on the right shoe before the left, and so on. The Pythagoreans were not, to begin with, complete vegetarians, but they avoided certain kinds of meat, fish, and poultry. Most famously, they were forbidden to eat beans (KRS 271–2, 275–6).

Note: intellectual commune history

Location 501

dietary rules were connected with Pythagoras’ beliefs about the soul. It did not die with the body, he believed, but migrated elsewhere, perhaps into an animal body of a different kind.3 Some Pythagoreans extended this into belief in a three-thousand-year cosmic cycle: a human soul after death would enter, one after the other, every kind of land, sea, or air creature, and finally return into a human body for history to repeat itself (Herodotus 2. 123; KRS 285).

Note: long scale reincarnation + recurrence / looping

Location 506

But Xenophanes elsewhere links water with earth as the original source of things, and indeed he believed that our earth must at one time have been covered by the sea. This is connected with the most interesting of his contributions to science: the observation of the fossil record. Seashells are found well inland, and on mountains too, and in the quarries in Syracuse impressions of fish and seaweed have been found. An impression of a bay leaf was found in Paros deep in a rock, and in Malta there are flat shapes of all kinds of sea creatures. These were produced when everything was covered with mud long ago, and the impressions dried in the mud. (KRS 184)

Note: prechristian evolution insights

Location 521

We possess more substantial portions of his work than of any previous philosopher, but that does not mean we find him easier to understand. His fragments take the form of pithy, crafted prose aphorisms, which are often obscure and sometimes deliberately ambiguous. Heraclitus did not argue, he pronounced. His delphic style may have been an imitation of the oracle of Apollo which, in his own words, ‘neither speaks, nor conceals, but gestures’ (KRS 244). The many philosophers in later centuries who have admired Heraclitus have been able to give their own colouring to his paradoxical, chameleon-like dicta. Even in antiquity Heraclitus was found difficult. He was nicknamed ‘the Enigmatic One’ and ‘Heraclitus the Obscure’ (D.L. 9. 6). He wrote a three-book treatise on philosophy—now lost—and deposited it in the great temple of Artemis (St Paul’s ‘Diana of the Ephesians’). People could not make up their minds whether it was a text of physics or a political tract. ‘What I understand of it is excellent,’ Socrates is reported as saying. ‘What I don’t understand may well be excellent also; but only a deep sea diver could get to the bottom of it’ (D.L. 2. 22). The nineteenth-century German idealist Hegel, who was a great admirer of Heraclitus, used the same marine metaphor to express an opposite judgement. When we reach Heraclitus after the fluctuating speculations of the earlier Presocratics, Hegel wrote, we come at last in sight of land. He went on to add, proudly, ‘There is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my own Logic.’5

Note: origins of cryptic philosophy

Location 541

saw himself as making a completely new start in philosophy. He thought the work of previous thinkers was worthless: Homer should have been eliminated at an early stage of any poetry competition, and Hesiod, Pythagoras, and Xenophanes were merely polymaths with no real sense

Location 552

Again like Xenophanes, Heraclitus believed that the sun was new every day (Aristotle, Mete. 2. 2355b13–14), and, like Anaximander, he thought the sun was constrained by a cosmic principle of reparation (KRS 226). The ephemeral theory of the sun is indeed in Heraclitus expanded into a doctrine of universal flux. Everything, he said, is in motion, and nothing stays still; the world is like a flowing stream. If we step into the same river twice, we cannot put our feet twice into the same water, since the water is not the same two moments together (KRS 214). That seems true enough, but on the face of it Heraclitus went too far when he said that we cannot even step twice into the same river (Plato, Cra. 402a). Taken literally, this seems false, unless we take the criterion of identity for a river to be the body of water it contains rather than the course it flows. Taken allegorically, it is presumably a claim that everything in the world is composed of constantly changing constituents: if this is what is meant, Aristotle said, the changes must be imperceptible ones (Ph. 8. 3. 253b9 ff.). Perhaps…

Note: constant motion

Location 557

Heraclitus once said that the world was an ever-living fire: sea and earth are the ashes of this perpetual bonfire. Fire is like gold: you can exchange gold for all kinds of goods, and fire can turn into any of the elements (KRS 217–19). This fiery world is the only world…

Note: eternal fire

Location 567

‘Logos’ is the everyday Greek term for a written or spoken word, but from Heraclitus onwards almost every Greek philosopher gave it one or more of several grander meanings. It is often rendered by translators as ‘Reason’—whether to refer to the reasoning powers of human individuals, or to some more exalted cosmic principle of order and beauty. The term found its way into Christian theology when the author of the fourth gospel…

Note: logos as fractal order

Location 571

Humans fall into three classes, at various removes from the rational fire that governs the universe. A philosopher like Heraclitus is closest to the fiery Logos and receives most warmth from it; next, ordinary people when awake draw light from it when they use their own reasoning powers; finally, those who are asleep have the…

Note: histtory of transendence hierarchies

Location 576

What Hegel most admired in Heraclitus was his insistence on the coincidence of opposites, such as that the universe is both divisible and indivisible, generated and ungenerated, mortal and immortal. Sometimes these identifications of opposites are straightforward statements of the relativity of certain predicates. The most famous, ‘The way up and the way down are one and the same’, sounds very deep. However, it need mean no more than that when, skipping down a mountain, I meet you toiling upward, we are both on the same path. Different things are attractive at different times: food when you are hungry, bed when you are sleepy (KRS 201). Different things attract different species: sea-water is wholesome for fish, but poisonous for humans; donkeys prefer rubbish to gold (KRS 199).

Note: paradox and conditionality

Location 586

Heraclitus did indeed believe that the cosmic fire went through stages of kindling and quenching (KRS 217). It is presumably also in this sense that we are to understand that the universe is both generated and ungenerated, mortal and immortal (DK 22 B50). The underlying process has no beginning and no end, but each cycle of kindling and quenching is an individual world that comes into and goes out of existence.

Note: cosmological evolution

Location 595

What survives of Heraclitus amounts to no more than 15,000 words. The enormous influence he has exercised on philosophers ancient and modern is a matter for astonishment. There is something fitting about his position in Raphael’s fresco in the Vatican stanze, The School of Athens. In this monumental scenario, which contains imaginary portraits of many Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, as is right and just, occupy the centre stage. But the figure to which one’s eye is immediately drawn on entering the room is a late addition to the fresco: the booted, brooding figure of Heraclitus, deep in meditation on the lowest step.9

Note: art analysis

Location 610

Better known is the second argument, commonly known as Achilles and the tortoise. ‘The slower’, Zeno said, ‘will never be overtaken by the swifter, for the pursuer must first reach the point from which the fugitive departed, so that the slower must necessarily remain ahead.’ Let us suppose that Achilles runs four times as fast as the tortoise, and that the tortoise is given a forty-metre start when they run a hundred-metre race against each other. According to Zeno’s argument, Achilles can never win. For by the time he reaches the forty-metre mark, the tortoise is ahead by ten metres. By the time Achilles has run those ten, the tortoise is still ahead by two and a half metres. Each time Achilles makes up a gap, the tortoise opens up a new, shorter, gap, so he can never overtake him (Aristotle, Ph. 5. 9. 239b11–14). These and other similar arguments of Zeno assume that distances and motions are infinitely divisible. His arguments have been dismissed by some philosophers as ingenious but sophistical paradoxes. Others have admired them greatly: Bertrand Russell, for instance, claimed that they provided the basis of the nineteenth-century mathematical renaissance of Weierstrass and Cantor.12 Aristotle, who preserved Zeno’s puzzles for us, claimed to disarm them, and to re-establish the possibility of motion, by distinguishing between two forms of infinity: actual infinity and potential infinity.13 But it was not for many centuries that the issues raised by Zeno were given solutions that satisfied both philosophers and mathematicians.

Location 656

Empedocles’ philosophy of nature can be regarded, from one point of view, as a synthesis of the thought of the Ionian philosophers. As we have seen, each of them had singled out some one substance as the basic or dominant stuff of the universe: Thales had privileged water, Anaximenes air, Xenophanes earth, and Heraclitus fire. For Empedocles all four of these substances stood on equal terms as the fundamental ingredients, or ‘roots’ as he put it, of the universe. These roots had always existed, he maintained, but they mingle with each other in various proportions in such a way as to produce the familiar furniture of the world and also the denizens of the heavens. From these four sprang what was and is and ever shall: Trees, beasts, and human beings, males and females all, Birds of the air, and fishes bred by water bright; The age-old gods as well, long worshipped in the height. These four are all there is, each other interweaving And, intermixed, the world’s variety achieving.

Note: first synthesizer? is he deserving as more than just a presocratic? Main ideas: elemental composition, conversation of mass, yin-yang dynamics, evolution, fractal cyclical history [e]

Location 683

What Empedocles called ‘roots’ were called by Plato and later Greek thinkers stoicheia, a word earlier used to indicate the syllables of a word. The Latin translation elementum, from which our ‘element’ is derived, compares the roots not to syllables, but to letters of the alphabet: an elementum is an LMNtum. Empedocles’ quartet of elements was assigned a fundamental role in physics and chemistry by philosophers and scientists until the time of Boyle in the seventeenth century. Indeed, it can be claimed that it is still with us, in altered form. Empedocles thought of his elements as four different kinds of matter; we think of solid, liquid, and gas as three states of matter. Ice, water, and steam would be, for Empedocles, specific instances of earth, water, and air; for us they are three different states of the same substance, H2O. It was not unreasonable to think of fire, and especially the fire of the sun, as a fourth element of equal importance. One might say that the twentieth-century emergence of the science of plasma physics, which studies the properties of matter at the sun’s temperature, has restored Empedocles’ fourth element to parity with the other three. Aristotle praised Empedocles for having realized that a cosmological theory must not just identify the elements of the universe, but must assign causes for the development and intermingling of the elements to make the living and inanimate compounds of the actual world. Empedocles assigns this role to Love and Strife: Love combines the elements, and Strife forces them apart. At one time the roots grow to be one out of many, at another time they split to be many out of one. These things, he said, never cease their continual interchange, now through love coming together into one, now carried apart from each other by Strife’s hatred (KRS 348). Love and Strife are the picturesque ancestors of the forces of attraction and repulsion which have figured in physical theory throughout the ages. For Empedocles, history is a cycle in which sometimes Love is dominant, and sometimes Strife. Under the influence of Love the elements combine into a homogeneous, harmonious, and resplendent sphere, reminiscent of Parmenides’ universe. Under the influence of Strife the elements separate out, but when Love begins to regain the ground it had lost, all the different species of living beings appear (KRS 360). All compound beings, such as animals and birds and fish, are temporary creatures that come and go; only the elements are everlasting, and only the cosmic cycle goes on for ever.

Location 690

To explain the origin of living species, Empedocles put forward a remarkable theory of evolution by survival of the fittest. First flesh and bone emerged as chemical mixtures of the elements, flesh being constituted by fire, air, and water in equal parts, and bone being two parts water to two parts earth and four parts fire. From these constituents unattached limbs and organs were formed: unsocketed eyes, arms without shoulders, and faces without necks (KRS 375–6). These roamed around until they chanced to find partners; they formed unions, which were often, at this preliminary stage, quite unsuitable. Thus there arose various monstrosities: human-headed oxen, ox-headed humans, androgynous creatures with faces and breasts on front and back (KRS 379). Most of these fortuitous…

Location 708

A woman called Pantheia, the story goes, given up for dead by the physicians, was miraculously restored to life by Empedocles. To celebrate, he offered a sacrificial banquet to eighty guests in a rich man’s house at the foot of Etna. When the other guests went to sleep, he heard his name called from heaven. He hastened to the summit of the volcano, and then, in Milton’s words, to be deemed A god, leaped fondly into Aetna flames. (Paradise Lost iii. 470)

Location 727

Matthew Arnold dramatized this story in his Empedocles on Etna. He places these verses in the mouth of the philosopher at the crater’s rim: This heart will glow no more; thou art A living man no more, Empedocles! Nothing but a devouring flame of thought— But a naked, eternally restless mind! To the elements it came from Everything will return Our bodies to earth, Our blood to water, Heat to fire, Breath to air. They were well born, they will be well entomb’d— But mind? (lines 326 –38) Arnold gives the philosopher, before his final leap, the hope that in reward for his love of truth his intellect will never wholly perish.

Location 733

If Empedocles achieved a kind of immortality as a precursor of Darwin, his contemporary Anaxagoras is sometimes regarded as an intellectual ancestor of the…

Location 740

Here is his account of the beginning of the universe: ‘All things were together, infinite in number and infinite in smallness; for the small too was infinite. While all things were together, nothing was recognizable because of its smallness. Everything lay under air and ether, both infinite’ (KRS 467). This primeval pebble began to rotate, throwing off the surrounding ether and air and forming out of them the stars and the sun and the moon. The rotation caused the separation of dense from rare, of hot from cold, of dry from wet, and bright from dark. But the separation was never complete, and to this day there remains in every single thing a portion of everything else. There is a little whiteness in what is black, a little cold in what is hot, and so on: things are named after the item that is dominant in it (Aristotle, Ph. 1. 4. 187a23). This is most obvious in the case of semen, which must contain hair and flesh, and much, much more; but it must also be true of the food we eat (KRS 483–4, 496). In this…

Location 745

men have been formed and the other ensouled animals. And the men possess farms and inhabit cities just as we do, and they have a sun and a moon and the rest just like us. The earth produces things of every sort for them to be harvested and stored, as it does for us. I have said all this about the process of separating off, because it would have happened not only here with us, but elsewhere too. (KRS 498) Anaxagoras thus has a claim to be the originator of the idea, later proposed by Giordano Bruno and…

Location 754

Mind is infinite and separate, and has no part in the general commingling of elements; if it did, it would get drawn into the evolutionary process and could not control it. This teaching, placing mind firmly in control of matter, so struck his contemporaries that they nicknamed Anaxagoras himself the Mind. It is difficult, however, to assess exactly what his doctrine, though it greatly impressed both Plato and Aristotle, actually meant in practice…

Location 760

Teleological explanation was more profound than mechanistic explanation. ‘If anyone wants to find out the reason why each thing comes to be or perishes or exists, this is what he must find out about it: how is it best for that thing to exist, or to act or be acted upon in any way?’

Location 769

Anaxagoras made his final benefaction to humanity: the invention of the school holiday. Asked by the authorities of the city how they should honour him, he said that children should be let off school in the month of his death.

Location 774

He once said that he would prefer to discover a single scientific explanation than to become king of Persia (D.L. 9. 41; DK 68 B118). Democritus’ fundamental thesis is that matter is not infinitely divisible. We do not know his exact argument for this conclusion, but Aristotle conjectured that it ran as follows. If we take a chunk of any kind of stuff and divide it up as far as we can, we will have to come to a halt at tiny bodies which are indivisible. We cannot allow matter to be divisible to infinity: for let us suppose that the division has been carried out and then ask: what would ensue if the division was carried out? If each of the infinite number of parts has any magnitude, then it must be further divisible, which contradicts our hypothesis. If, on the other hand, the surviving parts have no magnitude, then they can never have amounted to any quantity: for zero multiplied by infinity is still zero. So we have to conclude that divisibility comes to an end, and the smallest possible fragments must be bodies with sizes and shapes. These tiny, indivisible bodies were called by Democritus ‘atoms’ (which is just the Greek word for ‘indivisible’) (Aristotle, GC 1. 2. 316a13–b16).16 Atoms, Democritus believed, are too small to be detected by the senses; they are infinite in number and come in infinitely many varieties, and they have existed for ever. Against the Eleatics, he maintained that there was no contradiction in admitting a vacuum: there was a void, and in this infinite empty space atoms were constantly in motion, just like motes in a sunbeam. They come in different forms: they may differ in shape (as the letter A differs from the letter N), in order (as AN differs from NA), and in posture (as N differs from Z). Some of them are concave and some convex, and some are like hooks and some are like eyes. In their ceaseless motion they bang into each other and join up with each other (KRS 583). The middle-sized objects of everyday life are complexes of atoms thus united by random collisions, differing in kind on the basis of the differences between their constituent atoms (Aristotle, Metaph.

Location 785

sententious

Location 812

The sophists made a systematic study of forensic debate and oratorical persuasion. In this pursuit they wrote on many topics. They started with basic grammar: Protagoras was the first to distinguish the genders of nouns and the tenses and moods of verbs (Aristotle, Rh. 3. 4. 1407b6–8). They went on to list techniques of argument, and tricks of advocacy. As interpreters of ambiguous texts, and assessors of rival orations, they were among the earliest literary critics. They also gave public lectures and performances, and set up eristic moots, partly for instruction and partly for entertainment (D.L. 9. 53). Altogether, their roles encompassed those in modern society of tutors, consultants, barristers, public relations professionals, and media personalities.

Location 821

He read aloud a tract entitled On the Gods, whose opening words were long remembered: ‘About the gods, I cannot be sure whether they exist or not, or what they are like to see; for many things stand in the way of the knowledge of them, both the opacity of the subject and the shortness of human life’ (D.L. 9. 51). His most famous saying, ‘Man is the measure of all things’, encapsulated a relativist epistemology which will be examined in detail later in this book.18

Location 829

Prodicus from the island of Ceos in the Aegean, came to Athens, like Protagoras, on official business of his home state. He was a linguist, but more interested in semantics than grammar: he can perhaps be regarded as the first lexicographer. Aristophanes and Plato teased him as a pedant, who made quibbling distinctions between words that were virtually synonymous. In fact, however, some of the distinctions credited to him (such as that between two Greek equivalents of ‘want’, boulesthai and epithumein; Plato, Protagoras 340b2) were later of serious philosophical importance. Prodicus is credited with a romantic moral fable about the young Heracles choosing between two female impersonations of Virtue and Vice. He also had a theory of the origin of religion. ‘The men of old regarded the sun and the moon, rivers and springs, and whatever else is helpful for life, as gods, because we are helped by them, just as the Egyptians worship the Nile’ (DK 84 B5). Thus, the worship of Hephaestus is really the worship of fire, and the worship of Demeter is really the worship of bread.

Location 838

The first is a rhetorical exercise defending Helen of Troy against those who slander her, arguing that she deserves no blame for running off with Paris and thus sparking off the Trojan war. ‘She did what she did either because of the whims of fortune, the decisions of the gods and the decrees of necessity, or because she was abducted by force, or persuaded by speech, or overwhelmed by love’ (DK 82 B11, 21–4). Gorgias goes through these alternatives in turn, arguing in each case that Helen should be held free from blame. No human can resist fate, and it is the abductor, not the abductee, who merits blame. Thus far, Gorgias has an easy task: but in order to show that Helen should not be blamed if she succumbed to persuasion, he has to engage in an unconvincing, though no doubt congenial, encomium on the powers of the spoken word: ‘it is a mighty overlord, insubstantial and imperceptible, but it can achieve divine effects’. In this case, too, it is the persuader, not the persuadee, who should be blamed. Finally, if Helen fell in love, she is blameless: for love is either a god who cannot be resisted or a mental illness which should excite our pity. This brief and witty piece is the ancestor of many a philosophical discussion of freedom and determinism, force majeure, incitement, and irresistible impulse.

Location 849

The third argument, the most plausible of the three, argues that each individual’s sensations are private and that all we can pass on to our neighbours is words and not experiences.

Note: foundation of alienation, the central preidcament and cause of literature; that we use words to articulate our private experience but it can't even translate. Problems of qualia and consciousness too. rhetorical parody: (1) nothing exists; (2) if it did, we couldn't know; (3) if we knew, we couldn't communicate it. Pair this with this other work, his defense of Helen; the word as "a great lord that can work on the soul like a drug," that can reshape the psyche, values, emotions of the receiver; great power; (but perhaps, not responsibility) ... across 2 works; full theory of literature: we cannot communicate our inner world, but we can craft linguistic drugs to give someone an approximation; the limits and powers of language ... Giorgas as a ploy by Plato to account for objective knowledge systems, yet also he was the forefather of ancient greek prose. see Hegel & Wittgenstein; [e]

Location 866

In the history of philosophy Socrates has a place without parallel. On the one hand, he is revered as inaugurating the first great era of philosophy, and therefore, in a sense, philosophy itself. In textbooks all previous thinkers are lumped together in textbooks as ‘Presocratics’, as if philosophy prior to his age was somehow prehistoric. On the other hand, Socrates left behind no writing, and there is hardly a single sentence ascribed to him that we can be sure was his own utterance rather than a literary creation of one of his admirers. Our first-hand acquaintance with his philosophy is less than with that of Xenophanes, Parmenides, Empedocles, or Democritus. Yet his influence on subsequent philosophy, down to our own day, has been incomparably greater than theirs.

Note: Alt model where empodecles, plato, socrares are each T2 synthesis that feed into T3 Aristotelian synthesis; less about chronology or pre-socratic ... wonder if Plato cast a shadow over the pre-Socratics, most unique is that Socrates had a founding dramatic story [e]

Location 881

The hard facts of Socrates’ life do not take long to tell. He was born in Athens about 469 BC, ten years after the Persian invasions of Greece had been crushed at the battle of Plataea. He grew up during the years when Athens, a flourishing democracy under the statesman Pericles, exercised imperial hegemony over the Greek world. It was a golden age of art and literature, which saw the sculptures of Phidias and the building of the Parthenon, and in which Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides produced their great tragedies. At the same time Herodotus, ‘the father of history’, wrote his accounts of the Persian Wars, and Anaxagoras introduced philosophy to Athens. The second half of Socrates’ life was overshadowed by the Peloponnesian War (431–4), in which Athens was eventually forced to cede the leadership of Greece to victorious Sparta. During the first years of the war he served in

Location 891

An aspiring democrat politician, Anytus, with two associates, caused an indictment to be drawn up against Socrates in the following terms: ‘Socrates has committed an offence by not recognizing the gods whom the state recognizes but introducing other new divinities. He has also committed the offence of corrupting the young. Penalty demanded: death’ (D.L. 2. 40). We have no record of the trial, though two of Socrates’ admirers have left us imaginative reconstructions of his speech for the defence. Whatever he actually said failed to move a sufficient number of the 500 citizen jurors. He was found guilty, albeit by a small majority, and condemned to death. After a delay in prison, due to a religious technicality, Socrates died in spring 399, accepting a poisonous cup of hemlock from the executioner.

Note: real speech vs. plato's speech; historical recasting

Location 906

In 423 the dramatist Aristophanes had produced a comedy, The Clouds, in which he introduces a character called Socrates, who runs a college of chicanery which is also an institute of bogus research. Students at this establishment not only learn to make bad arguments trump good arguments, but also study astronomy in a spirit of irreverent scepticism about traditional religion. They invoke a new pantheon of elemental deities: air, ether, clouds, and chaos (260–6). The world, they are told, is governed not by Zeus, who does not exist, but by Dinos (literally ‘Vortex’), the rotation of the heavenly bodies (380–1). Much of the play is burlesque that is obviously not meant to be taken seriously: Socrates measures how many flea-feet a flea can leap, and explores the clouds in a ramshackle flying machine. But the allegation that astronomy was incompatible with piety, if it was a joke, was a dangerous one. After all, it was only in the previous decade that Anaxagoras had been banished for asserting that the sun was a fiery lump. At the end of the play Socrates’ house is burnt down by an angry crowd of people who wish to punish him for insulting the gods and violating the privacy of the moon. To those who recalled Aristophanes’ comedy, the events of 399 must have seemed a sorry case of life imitating art.

Note: synthesizes other: anaxagoras, empodecles, sophists ... christ like arc

Location 912

There is general agreement that he was pot-bellied and snub-nosed, pop-eyed and shambling in gait. He is regularly described as being shabby, wearing threadbare clothes, and liking to go barefoot. Even Aristophanes represents him as capable of great feats of endurance, and indifferent to privation: ‘never numb with cold, never hungry for breakfast, a spurner of wine and gluttony’ (414–17). From other sources it appears that he was a spurner of wine not in the sense of being a teetotaller, but as having an unusual ability to hold his liquor (Plato, Smp. 214a).…

Note: legends of pyth, S, and JC

Location 922

In antiquity, however, he was best known for his attachment to the flamboyant aristocrat Alcibiades, some twenty years his junior: an attachment which, though passionate, remained…

Note: interesting

Location 927

On more important issues, there is little that is certain about Socrates’ life and thought. For further information we are dependent above all on the two disciples whose works have come down to us intact, the soldierly historian Xenophon, and the idealist philosopher Plato. Both Xenophon and Plato composed, after the event, speeches for the defence at Socrates’ trial. Xenophon in addition wrote four books of memoirs of Socrates (memorabilia Socratis) and a Socratic dialogue, the Symposium. Plato, besides his Apology, wrote at least twenty-five dialogues, in all but one of which Socrates figures. Xenophon and Plato paint pictures of Socrates which differ from each other as much as the picture of Jesus given in the gospel of Mark differs from that in the gospel of John. While in Mark Jesus speaks in parables, brief aphorisms, and pointed responses to questions, the Jesus of the fourth gospel delivers extensive discourses that resonate at several levels. There is a similar contrast between Xenophon’s Socrates, who questions, argues, and exhorts in a workmanlike manner, and the Socrates of Plato’s Republic…

Note: the mode of historcal enshrinement

Location 930

Xenophon’s major concern in his memoirs was to exonerate Socrates from the charges made against him at his trial, and to show that his life was such that conservative Athenians should have revered him rather than condemned him to death. Xenophon is also anxious to place a distance between Socrates and the other philosophers of the age: unlike Anaxagoras he had no futile interest in physics or astronomy (Mem. 1. 1. 16), and unlike the sophists he did not charge any fees or pretend to expertise that he lacked

Note: spheres of damnation, still a thing! but shifted

Location 946

there is little in Xenophon’s work that would entitle Socrates to a prominent position in the history of philosophy. Several of the Presocratics would be more than a match for Xenophon’s Socrates in scope, insight, and originality. The Socrates who has captured the imagination of succeeding generations of philosophers is the Socrates of Plato,

Note: either Xenophon under rendered or Plato over rendered

Location 961

Plato’s dialogues do not assign a consistent role or personality to the character called Socrates. In some dialogues he is predominantly a critical inquirer, challenging the pretensions of other characters by a characteristic technique of question and answer—elenchus—which reduces them to incoherence. In other dialogues Socrates is quite willing to harangue his audience, and to present an ethical and metaphysical system in dogmatic form. In yet other dialogues he plays only a minor part, leaving the philosophical initiative to a different protagonist.

Note: pessoa selves; fractured lore

Location 965

All scholars agreed on including in the group the dialogues Critias, Philebus, Sophist, Statesman, and Timaeus, and all agreed that the group represented the latest stage of Plato’s writing career. There was no similar consensus about ordering within the group: but it is notable that the group includes all the dialogues in which Socrates’ role is at a minimum. Only in the Philebus is he a prominent character. In Laws he does not appear at all, and in the Timaeus, Critias, Sophist, and Politicus he has only a walk-on part while the lead role is given to another: in the first two to the protagonist named in the dialogue’s title, and in the latter two to a stranger from Parmenides’ town of Elea. It seemed reasonable, therefore, to regard the dialogues of this group as expressing the views of the mature Plato rather than those of his long-dead teacher.

Note: anchor then diverge

Location 979

‘Two things may fairly be attributed to Socrates: inductive arguments and general definitions; both are starting points of scientific knowledge. But he did not regard the universal or the definitions as separate entities, but [the Platonists] did, and called them Ideas of things.’

Note: essayism as inductive reasoning; experience to conclusion [e]

Location 987

A third group of dialogues can be identified by a set of common features: (1) they are short; (2) Socrates appears as an inquirer, not an instructor; (3) the Theory of Ideas is not presented; and (4) stylometrically they are at the greatest remove from the late group first identified. This group includes Crito, Charmides, Laches, Lysis, Ion, Euthydemus, and Hippias Minor. These dialogues are commonly accepted as those most likely to be presentations of the philosophical views of the historical Socrates. Here too belongs the Apology, in which Socrates is the sole speaker, on trial for his life, and which in philosophical content and stylometric features resembles the other dialogues of the group. The first book of the Republic, too, in both content and style, resembles this group more than it resembles the remaining books of the dialogue: some scholars suppose, with good reason, that it first existed as a separate dialogue, perhaps under the title Thrasymachus. It is difficult to assign a chronology within this early group, though some authors place the Lysis first and assign it before 399, on the basis of an ancient anecdote that it was read to Socrates himself, who said, ‘what a load of lies this young man tells about me’ (D.L. 3. 35). In my view there is good reason to accept the general consensus that thus divides the Platonic dialogues into three groups, early, middle, and late. The division results from the striking coincidence of three independent sets of criteria, dramatic, philosophical, and stylometric. Whether we focus on the dramatic role given to Socrates, or the…

Note: early plato

Location 992

According to both Plato and Xenophon, another factor that directed his interest was an oracle uttered in the name of Apollo by the entranced priestess in the shrine at Delphi. When asked if there was anyone in Athens wiser than Socrates, the priestess replied in the negative. Socrates professed to be puzzled by this response, and began to question different classes of people who claimed to possess wisdom of various kinds. It soon became clear that politicians and poets possessed no genuine expertise at all, and that craftsmen who were genuine experts in a particular area would pretend to a universal wisdom to which they had no claim. Socrates concluded that the oracle was correct in that he alone realized that his own wisdom was worthless

Note: does this speak to the inefectiveness of wisdom in society?

Location 1036

It was in matters of morality that it was most important to pursue genuine knowledge and to expose false pretensions. For according to Socrates virtue and moral knowledge were the same thing: no one who really knew what was the best thing to do could do otherwise, and all wrongdoing was the result of ignorance. This makes it all the more absurd that he should be accused of corrupting the young. Anyone would obviously prefer to live among good men than among bad men, who might harm him. He cannot, therefore, have any motive for corrupting the young on purpose; and if he is doing so unwittingly he should be educated rather than prosecuted (26a). Socrates, in the Apology, did not claim to possess himself the wisdom that is sufficient to keep a man from wrongdoing. Instead, he said that he relied on an inner divine voice, which would intervene if ever he was on the point of taking a wrong step (41d). So far from being an atheist, his whole life was dedicated to a divine mission, the campaign to expose false wisdom which was prompted by the Delphic oracle. What would really be a betrayal of God would be to desert his post through fear of death. If he were told that he could go free on condition that he abandon philosophical inquiry, he would reply, ‘Men of Athens, I honour and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy’

Note: non-virtuous baseline

Location 1041

The early dialogues of Plato portray Socrates carrying out his philosophical mission. Typically, the dialogue will be named after a personage who claims knowledge of a certain subject or who can be taken to represent a certain virtue: thus the Ion, on poetry, is named after a prizewinning rhapsode (a reciter of Homer), and the Laches, on courage, is named after a distinguished general. Charmides and Lysis, on passion, temperance, and friendship, are named after two bright young men who commanded a circle of aristocratic admirers. In each dialogue Socrates seeks a scientific account or definition of the topic under discussion, and by questioning reveals that the eponymous protagonist is unable to give one. The dialogues all end with the…

Note: aporia via elenchos; gadfly; midwife; love of the search of wisdom

Location 1051

Aristotle was right to pick out the search as a notable feature of Socratic method. The method has sometimes been criticized as involving the fallacious claim that we cannot ever know whether some particular action is or is not, say, just or pious unless we can give a watertight definition of justice and piety. Such a claim would be inconsistent with Socrates’ regular practice in the course of his elenchus of seeking agreement whether particular actions (such as returning a borrowed knife to a madman, or carrying out a strategic retreat in battle) do or do not exhibit particular virtues such as justice and courage. Socrates’ method involves only the weaker claim that unless we have a general definition of a virtue we will not (a) be able to say whether the virtue universally has a particular property, such as being teachable, or being beneficial, or (b) be able to decide difficult borderline cases, such as whether a son’s prosecuting his father for the manslaughter of an accused murderer is or is not an act of piety. The other feature of Socrates’ method emphasized by Aristotle, namely the use of inductive arguments, does in fact presuppose that we can be sure of truths about individual cases while still lacking universal definitions. Plato’s Socrates does not claim to have a watertight definition of techne, or craft; but over and over again he considers particular crafts in order to extract general truths about the nature of a craft. Thus, in Republic 1 he wishes to show that the test of a good craftsman is not whether he makes a lot of money, but whether he benefits the…

Note: on definitions

Location 1060

In the absence of the universal definition of a virtue, the general truths are applied to help settle difficult borderline cases of practice, and to evaluate…

Note: science of virtue

Location 1076

Can virtue be taught? For if virtue is knowledge, then surely it must be teachable; and yet it is difficult to point to any successful teachers of virtue. In Athens, however, there was no lack of people claiming to have the relevant expertise, namely the sophists. At the end of the early period, and before the central period of Plato’s writing career, we find a series of dialogues named after major sophists—Hippias, Gorgias, Protagoras—which address the question whether virtue can be taught and which deflate the pretensions of the sophists to possess the secret of its teachability. The Hippias Minor sets out a serious difficulty for the idea that virtue is a craft that can be learnt. A craftsman who makes a mistake unknowingly is inferior to a craftsman who makes a mistake deliberately; so if virtue is a craft, one who sins deliberately is more virtuous than one who sins in ignorance (376b). The Gorgias argues that rhetoric, the main arrow in the sophist’s quiver, is incapable of producing genuine virtue. The Protagoras seems to suggest—whether seriously or ironically—that virtue is indeed teachable, because it is the art of calculating the proportion of pleasure and pain among the consequences of one’s actions.23

Note: phronesis; personal decision; to abstract virtue atop moments; retroactive assignment of virtue

Location 1082

The Phaedo also contains Plato’s account of the last days of Socrates in prison. Socrates’ friend Crito has (in the dialogue named after him) failed to gain acceptance of a plan for escape. Socrates has rejected the proposal, saying that he owes so much to the laws of Athens, under which he was born and bred and lived contentedly, that he cannot now turn his back on his covenant with them and run away (51d–54c). The arrival of a ship from the sacred isle of Delos marks the end of the religious stay of execution, and Socrates prepares for death by engaging his friends in a long discussion of the immortality of the soul.24 The discussion ends with Socrates’ narrating a series of myths about the journeys in the underworld of the soul after it survives death. Crito asks whether Socrates has any instructions about his burial; he is told to remember that he will be burying only the body, and not the soul, which is to go to the joys of the blessed. After his last bath Socrates says farewell to his family, jokes with his gaoler, and accepts the cup of hemlock. He is represented (with a degree of medical improbability) as composing himself serenely as sensation gradually deserts his limbs. His last words, like so many in his life, are puzzling: ‘Crito, I owe a cock to Aesculapius [the god of healing]. Please remember to pay the debt.’ Once again we ask ourselves whether he means his words literally or is employing his unique form of irony. It is perhaps no coincidence that it is in one and the same dialogue that Plato records the last hours of Socrates and introduces clearly for the first time his own characteristic Theory of Ideas. As well as the physical death of Socrates, we witness the demise of his personal philosophy, to be reincarnated henceforth in the more metaphysical and mythical form of Platonism. When Socrates died, Plato was in his late twenties, having been his pupil for about eight years. A member of an aristocratic Athenian family, Plato would have been just old enough to have fought in the Peloponnesian War, as his brothers Glaucon and Adeimantus certainly did. His uncles Critias and Charmides were two of the Thirty Tyrants, but he himself took no part in Athenian political life. At the age of 40 he went to Sicily and became an associate of Dion, the brother-in-law of the reigning monarch, Dionysius I; during this visit he made the acquaintance of the Pythagorean philosopher Archytas. On his return to Athens he founded a philosophical community, the Academy, in a private grove beside his own house. Here a group of thinkers, under his direction, shared with each other their interests in mathematics, astronomy, metaphysics, ethics, and mysticism. When 60 years old he was invited back to Sicily by Dion’s nephew, who had now succeeded to the throne as Dionysius II; but his visit was not a success because Dion and Dionysius quarrelled with each other. A third visit as a royal adviser was equally abortive, and Plato returned home…

Note: first greek to cover?

Location 1102

Plato’s works as handed down to us amount to some half a million words. Though probably some of the works in the corpus are spurious, there are no written works attributed to Plato in antiquity that have not survived today.

Note: word counts of greats

Location 1128

The dialogue form enabled Plato to suspend judgement about difficult philosophical issues, while presenting the strongest arguments he could think of on both sides of the question (cf. D.L. 3. 52).

Note: advantage over an essay? easier to explore arguments.. [e]

Location 1134

For each thing that there is three things are necessary if we are to come by knowledge: first, the name, secondly, the definition, and thirdly, the image. Knowledge itself is a fourth thing, and there is a fifth thing that we have to postulate, which is that which is knowable and truly real. To understand this, consider the following example and regard it as typical of everything. There is something called a circle; it has a name, which we have just this minute used. Then there is its definition, a compound of nouns and verbs. We might give ‘The figure whose limit is at every point equidistant from its centre’ as the definition of whatever is round, circular, or a circle. Thirdly, there is what we draw, or rub out, or rotate, or cancel. The circle itself which all these symbolize does not undergo any such change and is a quite different thing. In the fourth place we have knowledge, understanding, and true opinion on these matters—these, collectively, are in our minds and not in sounds or bodily shapes, and thus are clearly distinct from the circle itself and from the three entities already mentioned. Of all these items, it is understanding that is closest to the fifth in kinship and likeness; the others are at a greater distance. What is true of round is also true of straight, of colour, of good and beautiful, and just; of natural and manufactured bodies; of fire, water, and the other elements; of all living beings and moral characters; of all that we do and undergo. In each case, anyone who totally fails to grasp the first four things will never fully possess knowledge of the fifth. (342a–d)

Note: knowledge is full conceptual model of the circle itself in isolation; understanding is relational, how you get it relative to otger forms, unity, being; applies to EA patterns [e]

Location 1145

In his other writings Plato uses many other expressions to refer to Ideas. ‘Forms’ (eide) is probably the most common, but the Idea or Form of X may be called ‘the X itself’, ‘that very thing that is X’, or ‘Xness’, or ‘what X is’.

Note: the essence of a thing requires understading of all other things, so you know what thing is not, and what makes it unique. ties to lexigraph. not just definitons and synonyms, but ones that denote a things suchness relative to related forms. without nuance this lets to muddled language and duiplicitous words [e]

Location 1160

He does not mention, even at the lowest level, actual material circular objects such as cartwheels and barrels. The reason for his omission is clear from other passages in his writings (e.g. Phd. 74a–c). The wheels and barrel we meet in experience are never perfectly circular: somewhere or other there will be a bend or bump which will interfere with the equidistance from the centre of every point on the circumference. This is true too, for that matter, of any diagram we may draw on paper or in the sand. Plato does not stress this point here, but it is the reason why he says that the diagram is at a greater distance from the circle itself than my concept is. My subjective concept of the circle—my understanding of what ‘circle’ means—is not the same as the Idea of the circle, because the Idea is an objective reality that is not the property of any individual mind. But at least the concept in my mind is a concept of a perfect circle; it is not merely an imperfect approximation to a circle, as the ring on my finger is.

Note: a wheel is its own eidos; no wheel meets the platonic wheel; and sure there can be subeiodtic wheels of an even tighter definition of which together distinguish themselves from cousin wheels, yet even within that family there is variance, and even if all were truly identical, each instance is then unique in its relaton to time, place, and event. no two bicycle wheels ever share a single sense of being... what interests me here is the web of eioditc relation, how bicycle wheel ladders up in multple directions, up to circle, up to two, up to travel... and so all real things are a congomerate of many forms

Location 1162

We may state a number of Platonic theses about Ideas and their relations to ordinary things in the world. (1) The Principle of Commonality. Wherever several things are F, this is because they participate in or imitate a single Idea of F (Phd. 100c; Men. 72c, 75a; Rep. 5. 476a10, 597c). (2) The Principle of Separation. The Idea of F is distinct from all the things that are F (Phd. 74c; Smp. 211b). (3) The Principle of Self-Predication. The Idea of F is itself F (Hp. Ma. 292e; Prt. 230c–e; Prm. 132a–b). (4) The Principle of Purity. The Idea of F is nothing but F (Phd. 74c; Smp. 211e). (5) The Principle of Uniqueness. Nothing but the Idea of F is really, truly, altogether F (Phd. 74d, Rep. 5. 479a–d). (6) The Principle of Sublimity. Ideas are everlasting, they have no parts and undergo no change, and they are not perceptible to the senses (Phd. 78d; Smp. 211b).

Note: instances embody a concept, but is not the concept, for a concept is only its abstract self, distinct from all other abstractions, and abstractions are supreme because they are everlasting, somehow embedded in the source code that generates all future instances

Location 1185

The Principle of Uniqueness is sometimes stated in a misleading way by commentators. Plato frequently says that only Ideas really are, and that the non-ideal particulars we encounter in sense-experience are between being and not being. He is often taken to be saying that only Ideas really exist, and that tangible objects are unreal and illusory. In context, it is clear that when Plato says that only Ideas really are, he does not mean that only Ideas really exist, but that only the Idea of F is really F, whatever F may be in the particular case. Particulars are between being and not being in that they are between being F and not being F—i.e. they are sometimes F and sometimes not F.27 For instance, only the Idea of Beauty is really beautiful, because particular beautiful things are (a) beautiful in one respect but ugly in another (in figure, say, but not in complexion), or (b) beautiful at one time but not another (e.g. at age 20 but not at age 70), (c) beautiful by comparison with some things, but not with others (e.g. Helen may be beautiful by comparison with Medea, but not by comparison with Aphrodite), (d) beautiful in some surroundings but not in others (Smp. 211 a–e). An important feature of the classical Theory of Ideas is the Principle of Sublimity. The particulars that participate belong to the inferior world of Becoming, the world of change and decay; the Ideas that are participated in belong to a superior world of Being, of eternal stability. The most sublime of all Ideas is the Idea of the Good, superior in rank and power to all else, from which everything that can be known derives its being (Rep. 509c).

Note: to take this literally though is to claim concepts and generalities actually speak to the configurations and parameters of the engine of reality; is this mostly through induction? ie: seeing particular to know universal; essayism [e]

Location 1208

Predicates. In modern logic a sentence such as ‘Socrates is wise’ is considered as having a subject, ‘Socrates’, and a predicate, which consists of the remainder of the sentence, i.e. ‘. . . is wise’. Some philosophers of logic, following Gottlob Frege, have regarded predicates as having an extra-mental counterpart: an objective predicate (Frege called it a ‘function’) corresponding to ‘. . . is a man’ in a way similar to that in which the man Socrates corresponds to the name ‘Socrates’. Frege’s functions, such as the function x is a man, are objective entities: they are more like the fifth items of the Seventh Letter than like the fourth items. They share some of the transcendental properties of Ideas: the function x is a man does not grow or die as human beings do, and nowhere in the world can one view or handle the function x is divisible by 7. But functions do not conform to the Principles of Self-Predication or Uniqueness. How could one ever imagine that the function x is a man, and only that function, was really and truly a human being? Classes. Functions serve as principles according to which objects can be collected into classes: objects that satisfy the function x is human, for instance, can be grouped into the class of human beings. Ideas in some way resemble classes: participation in an Idea can be assimilated to membership of a class. The difficulty in identifying Ideas with classes arises again over the Principle of Self-Predication. The class of men is not a man and we cannot say in general that the class of Fs is F. However, it seems at first sight as if there are, indeed, some classes that are members of themselves, such as the class of classes.

Note: predicates as relation layer

Location 1234

Socrates now presents a blueprint for a city with three classes. Those among the soldiers best fitted to rule are selected by competition to form the upper class, called guardians; the remaining soldiers are described as auxiliaries, and the rest of the citizens belong to the class of farmers and artisans (2. 374d–376e). How are the working classes to be brought to accept the authority of the ruling classes? A myth must be propagated, a ‘noble falsehood’, to the effect that members of the three classes have different metals in their soul: gold, silver, and bronze respectively. Citizens in general are to remain in the class in which they were born, but Socrates allows a limited amount of social mobility (3. 414c–415c). The rulers and auxiliaries are to receive an elaborate education in literature (based on a bowdlerized Homer), music (provided it is martial and edifying), and gymnastics (undertaken by both sexes in common) (2. 376e–3. 403b). Women as well as men are to be guardians and auxiliaries, but this involves severe restraints no less than privileges. Members of the upper classes are not allowed to marry; women are to be held in common and all sexual intercourse is to be public. Procreation is to be strictly regulated on eugenic grounds. Children are not to be allowed contact with their parents, but will be brought up in public creches. Guardians and auxiliaries may not own property or touch money; they will be given, free of charge, adequate but modest provisions, and they will live in common like soldiers in a camp (5. 451d–471c).

Note: On monastic officials [e]

Location 1293

Plato, we know from other dialogues, delighted in teasing his readers; he extended the irony he had learnt from Socrates into a major principle of philosophical illumination.

Note: Republic as totalitarian foil?

Location 1309

However, having woven the analogy with his classbound state into his moral psychology, Plato in later books of the Republic returns to political theory. His ideal state, he tells us, incorporates all the cardinal virtues: the virtue of wisdom resides in the guardians, fortitude in the auxiliaries, temperance in the working classes, and justice is rooted in the principle of the division of labour from which the city-state took its origin. In a just state every citizen and every class does that for which they are most suited, and there is harmony between the classes (4. 427d–434c). In less ideal states there is a gradual falling away from this ideal. There are five possible types of political constitution (8. 544e). The first and best constitution is called monarchy or aristocracy: if wisdom rules it does not matter whether it is incarnate in one or many rulers. There are four other inferior types of constitution: timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and despotism (8. 543c). Each of these constitutions declines into the next because of the downgrading of one of the virtues of the ideal state. If the rulers cease to be persons of wisdom, aristocracy gives place to timocracy, which is essentially rule by a military junta (8. 547c). Oligarchy differs from timocracy because oligarchic rulers lack fortitude and military virtues (8. 556d). Oligarchs do possess, in a rather miserly form, the virtue of temperance; when this is abandoned oligarchy gives way to democracy (8. 555b). For Plato, any step from the aristocracy of the ideal republic is a step away from justice; but it is the step from democracy to despotism that marks the enthronement of injustice incarnate (8. 576a). So the aristocratic state is marked by the presence of all the virtues, the timocratic state by the absence of wisdom, the oligarchic state by the decay of fortitude, the democratic state by contempt for temperance, and the despotic state by the overturning of justice. Plato recognizes that in the real world we are much more likely to encounter the various forms of inferior state than the ideal constitution described in the Republic. Nonetheless, he insists that there will be no happiness, public or private, except in such a city, and such a city will never be brought about unless philosophers become kings or kings become philosophers (5. 473c–d). Becoming a philosopher, of course, involves working through Plato’s educational system in order to reach acquaintance with the Ideas.

Note: Democracy vs philosopher king

Location 1310

Marriage, far from being abolished, is imposed by law, and bachelors over 35 have to pay severe annual fines

Note: Domestic enforcement

Location 1338

Finally, legislators must realize that even the best laws are constantly in need of reform

Note: History of thought on amendments; from Plato to America to the future

Location 1339

On the other hand, Magnesia has several features reminiscent of the Republic. Supreme power in the state rests with a Nocturnal Council, which includes the wisest and most highly qualified officials, specially trained in mathematics, astronomy, theology, and law (though not, like the guardians of the Republic, metaphysics).

Note: Council of monkish philo-kings

Location 1340

Each law must have a preamble setting out its purpose, so that citizens may conform to it with understanding. For instance, a law compelling marriage between the age of 30 and 35 should have a preamble explaining that procreation is the method by which human beings achieve immortality

Note: On legal legibility; also on the idea of children as immortality, and the thought of requiring it!

Location 1347

From time to time in the Laws Plato engages in theoretical discussion of sexual morality, though actual sexual legislation is restricted to a form of excommunication for adultery (7. 785d–e). In a way that has been very common during the Christian era, but was rare in pagan antiquity, he bases his sexual ethics on the notion that procreation is the natural purpose of sex. The Athenian says at one point that he would like to put into effect ‘A law to permit sexual intercourse only for its natural purpose, procreation, and to prohibit homosexual relations; to forbid the deliberate killing of a human offspring and the casting of seed on rocks and stone where it will never take root and fructify’ (8. 838e). He realizes, however, that it will be very difficult to ensure compliance with such a law, and instead he proposes other measures to stamp out sodomy and discourage all forms of non-procreative intercourse (8. 836e, 841d). We have reached a point in Plato’s thinking far distant from the arch homosexual banter which is such a predominant feature of the Socratic dialogues.

Note: Pre Christian roots of sexual repression

Location 1354

The world of the Timaeus is not a field of mechanistic causes: it is fashioned by a divinity, variously called its father, its maker, or its craftsman (demiourgos) (28c).

Note: How does this differ from monotheism?

Location 1367

Like the Lord God in Genesis, the maker of the world looked at what he had made and found that it was good; and in his delight he adorned it with many beautiful things. But the Demiurge differs from the creator of Judaeo-Christian tradition in several ways. First of all, he does not create the world from nothing: rather, he brings it into existence from a primordial chaos, and his creative freedom is limited by the necessary properties of the initial matter (48a). ‘God, wishing all things to be good and nothing, if he could help it, paltry, and finding the visible universe in a state not of peace but of inharmonious and disorderly motion, brought it from disorder into an order that he judged to be altogether better’ (30a). Secondly, while the Mosaic creator infuses life into an inert world at a certain stage of its creation, in Plato both the ordered universe and the archetype on which it was patterned are themselves living beings. What is this living archetype? He does not tell us, but perhaps it is the world of Ideas which, he concluded belatedly in the Sophist, must contain life. God created the soul of the world before he formed the world itself: this world-soul is poised between the world of being and the world of becoming

Note: compare this to recent logs [e]

Location 1374

In contrast to those earlier philosophers who spoke of multiple worlds, Plato is very firm that our universe is the only one (31b).

Note: No multiverse

Location 1386

He follows Empedocles in regarding the world as made up of the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and he follows Democritus in believing that the different qualities of the elements are due to the different shapes of the atoms that constitute them. Earth atoms are cubes, air atoms are octahedrons, fire atoms are pyramids, and water atoms are icosahedrons. Pre-existent space was the receptacle into which the maker placed the world, and in a mysterious way it underlies the transmutation of the four elements, rather as a lump of gold underlies the different shapes that a jeweller may give to it (50a). In this Plato seems to anticipate the prime matter of Aristotelian hylomorphism.31

Note: Evolution of elemental thinking

Location 1387