Background to Plato

As I intimated on Thursday, we will discuss several key factors that I take to be essential to making sense of Plato. One is the history of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, which unfolded thoughout Plato's youth. You are reading excerpts from Thucydides' comprehensive history of that conflict, and I will give you a thumbnail overview on Tuesday of the events surrounding it as they relate directly to the execution of Plato's friend Socrates in 399 b.c.e. by the restored Athenian democracy.

Another piece of the puzzle, as I began to suggest on Thursday, is the complex relationship of Greek societies in the Fifth and early Fourth centuries b.c.e. to spoken and written language. Alphabetic writing was a relatively recent innovation (introduced probably sometime between 750 and 700 b.c.e.), and even in the late Fifth century Athens was still overwhelmingly an oral society, both in its commercial and its political dealings. Literacy was confined to a small elite, and the written word (and number) was largely a mnemonic and accounting device serving to support and reinforce memory, rather than a primary means of communication. This was changing of course, but slowly, and not without creating difficulties. As we shall see, Plato was both an advocate of new ways of doing things made possible in part by growing literacy, and at the same time deeply suspicious of writing as a substitute for interpersonal discourse (much as intellectuals today are often wary of electronics as a wholesale replacement for books, or for seminars).

Thirdly, in due course we will discuss the philosophical/scientific background to Plato's thought, beginning with Parmenides and Heraclitus in particular, and with the so-called Socratic Turn away from cosmological specuation and toward committed moral (and hence social) inquiry. Some of you have a strong background in earlier Ancient Greek thought, and you can be of service to us in helping to clarify these relationships.

A note on retaining the heading "Skeptiblog," which originally referred to a course last spring on ancient and contemporary Skepticism. In part because of Plato's artful use of the dialogue form (in which he himself never speaks), I concur with Alfred North Whitehead's assessment that in every utterance as to Plato we speak under correction. We needn't throw up our hands -- Plato's surviving writings are rich with possible conclusions -- but it is wise to be alert to our fallibility in attributing them wholesale to Plato himself.
Posted by Matt Silliman at 1:49 PM 0 comments