For the Greeks and Plato, excellence is virtue. According to Socrates, virtue is knowledge. Thus, knowledge is required to be just.
From this Plato concludes that virtue can be obtained through three stages of development of knowledge: knowledge of one's own job, self-knowledge, and knowledge of the Idea of the Good. According to Plato, social justice can be achieved when all social classes in a society, workers, warriors, and rulers are in a harmonious relationship.
Plato believes that all people can easily exist in harmony when society gives them equal educational opportunity from an early age to compete fairly with each other. Without equal educational opportunity, an unjust society appears since the political system is run by unqualified people; timocracy, oligarchy, defective democracy, or tyranny will result. Modern education in Japan and other East Asian countries has greatly contributed to developing their societies in economic terms.
Of those we listed as authentic, above in the early group , only the Hippias Major continues occasionally to be listed as inauthentic. The strongest evidence against the authenticity of the Hippias Major is the fact that it is never mentioned in any of the ancient sources.
However, relative to how much was actually written in antiquity, so little now remains that our lack of ancient references to this dialogue does not seem to be an adequate reason to doubt its authenticity. In style and content, it seems to most contemporary scholars to fit well with the other Platonic dialogues.
Although no one thinks that Plato simply recorded the actual words or speeches of Socrates verbatim, the argument has been made that there is nothing in the speeches Socrates makes in the Apology that he could have not uttered at the historical trial. But as we have said, most scholars treat these as representing more or less accurately the philosophy and behavior of the historical Socrates—even if they do not provide literal historical records of actual Socratic conversations.
Some of the early dialogues include anachronisms that prove their historical inaccuracy. Contemporary scholars generally endorse one of the following four views about the dialogues and their representation of Socrates:.
There is just too little and too little that is at all interesting to be found that could reliably be attributed to Socrates from any other ancient authors. As a result of his attempt to discern the true meaning of this oracle, Socrates gained a divinely ordained mission in Athens to expose the false conceit of wisdom.
Platonic dialogues continue to be included among the required readings in introductory and advanced philosophy classes, not only for their ready accessibility, but also because they raise many of the most basic problems of philosophy. Unlike most other philosophical works, moreover, Plato frames the discussions he represents in dramatic settings that make the content of these discussions especially compelling. In these dialogues, we also find Socrates represented as holding certain religious beliefs, such as:.
Scholarly attempts to provide relative chronological orderings of the early transitional and middle dialogues are problematical because all agree that the main dialogue of the middle period, the Republic, has several features that make dating it precisely especially difficult. As we have already said, many scholars count the first book of the Republic as among the early group of dialogues. But those who read the entire Republic will also see that the first book also provides a natural and effective introduction to the remaining books of the work.
If this central work of the period is difficult to place into a specific context, there can be no great assurance in positioning any other works relative to this one. Nonetheless, it does not take especially careful study of the transitional and middle period dialogues to notice clear differences in style and philosophical content from the early dialogues.
In the early dialogues, moreover, Socrates discusses mainly ethical subjects with his interlocutors—with some related religious, methodological, and epistemological views scattered within the primarily ethical discussions.
The philosophical positions Socrates advances in these dialogues are vastly more systematical, including broad theoretical inquiries into the connections between language and reality in the Cratylus , knowledge and explanation in the Phaedo and Republic, Books V-VII.
This theory of Forms, introduced and explained in various contexts in each of the middle period dialogues, is perhaps the single best-known and most definitive aspect of what has come to be known as Platonism.
Plato sometimes characterizes this participation in the Form as a kind of imaging, or approximation of the Form. The same may be said of the many things that are greater or smaller and the Forms of Great and Small Phaedo 75c-d , or the many tall things and the Form of Tall Phaedo e , or the many beautiful things and the Form of Beauty Phaedo 75c-d, Symposium e, Republic V.
If so, Plato believes that The Form of Beauty is perfect beauty, the Form of Justice is perfect justice, and so forth.
Conceiving of Forms in this way was important to Plato because it enabled the philosopher who grasps the entities to be best able to judge to what extent sensible instances of the Forms are good examples of the Forms they approximate. In the Republic, he writes as if there may be a great multiplicity of Forms—for example, in Book X of that work, we find him writing about the Form of Bed see Republic X. He may have come to believe that for any set of things that shares some property, there is a Form that gives unity to the set of things and univocity to the term by which we refer to members of that set of things.
Knowledge involves the recognition of the Forms Republic V. In the early transitional dialogue, the Meno, Plato has Socrates introduce the Orphic and Pythagorean idea that souls are immortal and existed before our births.
All knowledge, he explains, is actually recollected from this prior existence. It is an interest, however, that shows up plainly in the middle period dialogues, especially in the middle books of the Republic. Stylometry has tended to count the Phaedo among the early dialogues, whereas analysis of philosophical content has tended to place it at the beginning of the middle period.
Similar accounts of the transmigration of souls may be found, with somewhat different details, in Book X of the Republic and in the Phaedrus, as well as in several dialogues of the late period, including the Timaeus and the Laws. No traces of the doctrine of recollection, or the theory of reincarnation or transmigration of souls, are to be found in the dialogues we listed above as those of the early period.
The moral psychology of the middle period dialogues also seems to be quite different from what we find in the early period. Hence, all wrongdoing reflects some cognitive error.
But in the middle period, Plato conceives of the soul as having at least three parts:. Republic IV. Republic X. In both of these dialogues, Plato clearly regards actual physical or sexual contact between lovers as degraded and wasteful forms of erotic expression. For this reason, Plato thinks that most people sadly squander the real power of love by limiting themselves to the mere pleasures of physical beauty. One of the novelties of the dialogues after those of the middle period is the introduction of a new philosophical method.
This method was introduced probably either late in the middle period or in the transition to the late period, but was increasingly important in the late period. Although the middle period dialogues continue to show Socrates asking questions, the questioning in these dialogues becomes much more overtly leading and didactic. In this method, the philosopher collects all of the instances of some generic category that seem to have common characteristics, and then divides them into specific kinds until they cannot be further subdivided.
This method is explicitly and extensively on display in the Sophist, Statesman, and Philebus. One of the most puzzling features of the late dialogues is the strong suggestion in them that Plato has reconsidered his theory of Forms in some way. Although there seems still in the late dialogues to be a theory of Forms although the theory is, quite strikingly, wholly unmentioned in the Theaetetus, a later dialogue on the nature of knowledge , where it does appear in the later dialogues, it seems in several ways to have been modified from its conception in the middle period works.
But then, if Man 2 is male, then what it has in common with the other male things is participation in some further Form, Man 3, and so on. If the Form of Man is itself a perfect male, then the Form shares a property in common with the males that participate in it. But since the Theory requires that for any group of entities with a common property, there is a Form to explain the commonality, it appears that the theory does indeed give rise to the vicious regress.
Of relevance to this discussion is the relative dating of the Timaeus and the Parmenides, since the Theory of Forms very much as it appears in the middle period works plays a prominent role in the Timaeus.
Thus, the assignment of a later date to the Timaeus shows that Plato did not regard the objection to the Theory of Forms raised in the Parmenides as in any way decisive. Whatever value Plato believed that knowledge of abstract entities has for the proper conduct of philosophy, he no longer seems to have believed that such knowledge is necessary for the proper running of a political community.
In several of the late dialogues, Socrates is even further marginalized. He is either represented as a mostly mute bystander in the Sophist and Statesman , or else absent altogether from the cast of characters in the Laws and Critias. In the Theaetetus and Philebus, however, we find Socrates in the familiar leading role. The myth of Atlantis is continued in the unfinished dialogue intended to be the sequel to the Timaeus, the Critias.
The Timaeus is also famous for its account of the creation of the universe by the Demiurge. Plato takes the four elements, fire, air, water, and earth which Plato proclaims to be composed of various aggregates of triangles , making various compounds of these into what he calls the Body of the Universe. Unlike his earlier treatment in the Republic, however, the Laws appears to concern itself less with what a best possible state might be like, and much more squarely with the project of designing a genuinely practicable, if admittedly not ideal, form of government.
According to Diogenes Laertius 3. Thomas Brickhouse Email: brickhouse lynchburg. Nicholas D. Smith Email: ndsmith lclark. Plato — B. Biography a. Birth It is widely accepted that Plato, the Athenian philosopher, was born in B.
Influences on Plato a. Diogenes Laertius also notes other important influences: He mixed together in his works the arguments of Heracleitus, the Pythagoreans, and Socrates. However, Plato eventually set aside the project of illustrating the ideal city in action: the Critias breaks off after 15 pages, in mid-sentence, and the third dialogue in the series, Hermocrates , was never written at all.
The difference between the philosophical approach of the Republic and that of the Timaeus lies in the fact that Plato concerns himself in the later dialogue with the structure of the visible heaven as a model for the human soul, and also with the material conditions of human physiology. Plato now seems convinced that in order to explain the nature of a living being, it is necessary to show what factors constitute such a live organism. This intention explains certain peculiarities of the Timaeus that make the dialogue hard to penetrate.
For the dialogue falls into three rather disparate parts. The first part describes the structure of the world-soul and its replication in the human soul in a way that combines the formal principles with those of mathematics and harmonics and illustrates it with fantastic imagery 29d—47e.
The second part consists of a rather meticulous account of the elementary physical constituents of nature, which are held to be formed of geometrically constructed atoms 47e—69a. The third part combines elements from the first and second parts in a lengthy explanation of human physiology and psychology 69b—92c. Suffice it to say that this structure combines three features — namely, 1 the components or ingredients, of the world-soul itself, which are the essential tools for dialectic ; 2 the mathematical proportions that define the structure of the world-soul; and 3 the influence that the structure of the world-soul has in turn on the observable order of the universe, such as the motion of the heavenly bodies.
According to Plato, the soul itself is composed of being, sameness, and difference — i. Each of the three concepts that constitute the world-soul do so in a mixture of their unchangeable and their changeable types Ti. What is the use of this strange concoction?
As Timaeus points out, the combination of the eternal and temporal versions of the formal concepts allows the soul to comprehend both unchangeable and changeable objects in the world 37a—c. By mixing together the unchangeable and the changeable versions of the formal concepts, Plato maintains the unity of the soul. In other words, there is no such thing as a world-reason — dealing only with eternal being, sameness and difference — separate from the world-soul , which is concerned with temporal and changeable things, their being, sameness and difference.
Rather, there is one mental force that does both, resulting in either knowledge or firm belief. The portions 1 - 2 - 4 - 8 - 3 - 9 - 27 of the mixture, with further subdivisions according to the arithmetical, geometrical and harmonic means, are the proportions that demarcate the intervals in theoretical harmonics 1 : 2 is the ratio underlying the octave, 3 : 2 the fifth, 4 : 3 the fourth, 9 : 8 the major second, etc.
As these harmonic divisions suggest, the world-soul is at the same time a kind of musical instrument. No music of the spheres is mentioned in the Timaeus , but Plato seems to have in mind at least the possibility of heavenly music.
The mathematical proportions are applied, in turn, to explain the order and the motions of the heavenly bodies 36b—d. For the soul-bands, divided in different proportions, form circles that are ordered in a complicated system, and in doing so they represent a geometrical model of the motions and distances of the stars revolving around the earth.
Why does Plato burden himself and his readers with such a complex machinery and what does this heavenly instrument have to do with ethics? Since the human soul is formed from the same ingredients as the world soul albeit in a less pure form , and displays the same structure 41d—e , Plato is clearly not just concerned with the order of the universe, but with that of the human soul as well.
He attributes to it the possession of the kinds of concepts that are necessary for the understanding of the nature of all things, both eternal and temporal. A theory of recollection of the nature of all things is no longer being advocated. Rather, Plato is concerned with ascertaining all of the following: 1 the most important concepts used to identify and differentiate objects in the way necessary for dialectical procedure; 2 the numbers and proportions needed to understand numerical relations and harmonic structures of all sorts; and 3 the capacity of the soul to perform and comprehend harmoniously coordinated motions.
This, it seems, is all the soul gets and all it needs in order to perform its various tasks. His overall message should be clear, however: the soul is a harmoniously structured entity, that can in principle function forever, and it also comprehends the corresponding structures in other entities, and therefore has access to all that is good and well-ordered.
This last point has consequences for his ethical thought that are not developed in the Timaeus itself, but that can be detected in other late dialogues. It shows up rather early. If mathematics looms large, then, it is as a model science on account of its exactness, the stability of its objects, and their accessibility to reason.
A systematic exploration of the notion that measure and proportion are the fundamental conditions of goodness is confined to the late dialogues. The importance of measure in a literal sense becomes more explicit, however, in the Philebus , the dialogue that is concerned with the question of whether pleasure or knowledge constitutes the human good. The dialectician must know precisely how many species and subspecies a certain genus contains; otherwise he has no claim to any kind of expertise.
This is because Socrates suddenly remembers that neither of the two contenders suffices in itself for the good life, and that a mixture of the two is preferable. As he now states, all beings belong in one of four classes — namely 1 limit peras , 2 the unlimited apeiron , 3 the mixture meixis of limit and the unlimited, or 4 the cause aitia of such a mixture.
As the subsequent explications concerning the four classes show, the unlimited comprises all those things that have no exact grade or measure in themselves, such as the hotter and colder, the faster and slower. Although at first the examples are confined to relative terms, the class of the unlimited is then extended to things like hot and cold, dry and moist, fast and slow, and even heat and frost. Mixture takes place when such qualities take on a definite quantity poson or due measure metrion that limits their variation.
For there would be no blending in such cases at all, but really an unconnected medley, the ruin of whatever happens to be contained in it. Since indeterminate elements usually turn up in pairs of opposites, the right limit in each case is the right proportion necessary for their balance.
In the case of health, there must be the right balance between the hot and the cold, the dry and the moist. The cause of the proper proportion for each mixture turns out to be reason; it is the only member of the fourth class. As Socrates indicates, divine reason is the ultimate source of all that is good and harmonious in the universe, while human reason is but a poor copy 26e—27c; 28a—30e.
Reason, by contrast, belongs to the fourth class, as the cause of good mixtures. It turns out that pleasure is at best a remedial good: pleasure is always the filling of a lack, or the restoration of a harmonious state, and therefore pleasure presupposes some kind of disturbance of the physical or mental equilibrium. The rivals of the pleasures — the different intellectual disciplines — also vary in quality; but in their case the difference in quality depends on the amount of mathematical precision they contain 55c—59d.
In the final ranking of goods, measure and due proportion, unsurprisingly, get the first rank, things in proper proportion come in second, reason is ranked third, the arts and sciences obtain fourth place, whereas the true and pure pleasures get fifth and last place on the scale of goods 64c—67b. If Plato in the Philebus is more favorably disposed towards a hedonist stance than in some of his earlier works, he is so only to a quite limited degree: he regards pleasure as a necessary ingredient in human life, because both the physical and the psychic equilibria that constitute human nature are unstable.
There is always some deficiency or lack that needs supplementing. But even they are deemed goods only because they are compensations for human imperfection. There are two questions worth exploring here. One concerns the role that Plato assigns to measure in his late concept of ethics.
This explains his confidence that even physical entities can attain a relatively stable state. This applies not only to the nature of the visible universe, but also to the human body and mind, as long as they are in good condition.
His confidence seems to have extended not only to the physical, but also to the moral state of human nature. That assumption is confirmed not only by the emphasis on right mixture in the Philebus , but also by the the discussion in the Laws about how the laws are to achieve peace in the state and harmony in the souls of the citizens.
If a man draws the right amount from the right one at the right time, he lives a happy life. Suffice it to note that the discussion of the right measure of pleasure and pain forms the preface to the entire project. But there is one element you could isolate in any account you give, and this is the correct formation of our feelings of pleasure and pain, which makes us hate what we ought to hate from first to last, and love what we ought to love.
That individuals differ in their internal and external conditions is as clear to Plato as it is to Aristotle. This does not shake his faith in the Laws that right habituation through the right kind of education, most of all in the arts, will provide the necessary inner equilibrium in the good citizen. It should be noted, however, that Plato carefully refrains from going into any specifics about concrete mathematical relations. Even in the Timaeus , he does not apply his complicated system of proportions when it comes to specifying the actual size, distance, and speed of the heavenly bodies.
Nor does he indicate in the Philebus how the art of establishing the limits of good mixtures should be attained. It therefore remains an open question to what extent Plato regarded mathematical physics and metaphysics as viable projects.
That Plato went some way in that direction seems to be indicated by claims in later reports on his theory of the Forms, that he either treated the Forms as numbers or associated numbers with them. Because Aristotle is quite vociferous in his criticism of this theory in Book A of the Metaphysics A 6; A 9 and further expands his criticism of ideas as numbers or idea-numbers in books M and N, there must be some substance to that claim. Aristoxenos, Harmonica , II, But it was not just the general public who found the message hard to comprehend.
Simplicius also reports that Porphyry, his source, used the Philebus to unravel the enigma In Aristotelis physica , Given the disagreements in our sources, it may forever remain a matter of debate how far Plato went in his mathematization of his ethics and metaphysics. We may well ask why he shouldered his philosophy with such heavy baggage that made it inaccessible to the mathematically untrained, an inaccessibility that largely persists to this day and age.
Clearly, there is one conviction that Plato never gave up: The nature of all things requires knowledge, and that condition applies most of all to the Good. And if it takes mathematical knowledge to comprehend what is good, then that is the way to go. Signs of this more conciliatory stance can be seen in the depiction of a mixed life in the Philebus , which is a life open to everyone, as well as in the portrayal in the Laws of the city-state of Magnesia, which is depicted as the second-best state, but as a one that is more accommodating to ordinary human nature.
It is a state that is no longer divided into three classes, and where there are no philosopher-kings and -queens in control of everything; the heavy work is done by slaves of foreign origin.
If Plato does not assign unlimited power to a special class it is for two reasons: he recognizes that persons of super-human virtue are not easy to find and that scientific education and philosophy alone are no warranty of goodness. Plato no longer expects any human being to be immune to the temptations of power. Humans are to be servants of the laws, not masters of each other. It may seem paradoxical that Plato became more conciliatory towards the ordinary human condition at the same time as his confidence in scientific rigor increased.
But there actually is no paradox. His conciliatory stance seems, rather, to reflect his insight that, the more complex things get, the less precision is to be attained. Therefore no mathematical precision can be expected in the ordering of such complex mixtures as the human soul and life.
That ethics cannot be done with the same precision as mathematics is not, then, an insight that occurred only to Aristotle. But Plato must have thought that precision should at least be aimed for, if life is to be based on a harmonious order that is accessible, at least to a certain degree, to human knowledge. But he no longer puts so much emphasis on the distance between the best and the ordinary.
He retains his conviction, however, that a well-ordered soul is the prerequisite of the good life and that human beings need not only a careful moral education, but also a well-regulated life. Preliminaries 2. The early dialogues: Examining life 2. The middle period: Justice and other virtues 3. The later dialogues: Ethics and Dialectic 4. The late dialogues: Ethics and Cosmology 5.
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